Sounding Confident in English as a Non-Native Speaker: My Honest Fix

I Thought I Sounded Confident in Meetings — Until I Listened Back

The awkward journey of fixing my own voice

You ever listen to your own voice in a meeting recording and immediately want to delete yourself from existence?

Yeah.

There was a time I genuinely believed I spoke pretty well in meetings. I knew my product, I wasn’t fumbling, I got the job done. I’d drop updates, discuss features, crack a tired dev joke, and exit the Zoom with a mental high-five.

Then one day, I listened to the recording.

My entire illusion of confidence shattered in 1.5x playback.

I sounded… uncertain. Mumbly. Like I was trying not to wake up a sleeping roommate.

It wasn’t the what I said. It was the how.

Meanwhile, the sales guy who joined the call? He sounded like a TED Talk in a three-piece suit.

I couldn’t stop thinking — why does his voice command attention, and mine sounds like it’s waiting for validation?

The weird part? I know English. I use it all day.

This wasn’t a grammar thing.

I wasn’t pausing to think of words — I was pausing because I doubted myself mid-sentence.

I realized:

Knowing English ≠ sounding confident in English.

And there’s no tool for that.

Everything out there is like:

“Learn English in 30 days!”

“Master the Present Perfect Continuous!”

Bro I’m not here to ace a CBSE exam. I just want to stop sounding like a nervous intern every time I say “let me share my screen.”

So I tried fixing it…

First, I recorded myself speaking and tried to self-review.

But that turned into a spiral of cringing and overthinking.

Then I looked into AI tools that analyze voice — but most were built for podcasts, or ESL learners, or cost more than my monthly food budget.

I wanted something simple:

Tell me what I’m doing wrong in my delivery — pace, filler words, tone — and how to fix it.

So… in the most indie-dev way possible, I built one.

Just for me.

I called it PitchMirror — but that name came 

much later.

At first, it was just a weekend hack where I could paste a meeting link, and it’d give me rough feedback on my tone and delivery.

No frills. No design. Just raw feedback from AI on how I sounded.

And slowly, I started noticing things:

• How often I said “basically” when I got nervous
• How fast I spoke when I was trying to wrap up
• How flat my tone was during the parts where I thought I was enthusiastic

It wasn’t dramatic. It was subtle. But it worked.

Every time I saw a “Confidence: 62%” score, I didn’t take it personally — I took it as a challenge. Like debugging my voice.

So yeah… that’s how PitchMirror happened.

It wasn’t a product idea.

It was a personal pain. A quiet insecurity.

And me being too stubborn to live with it.

Now it is a tool — and people are using it — but it started with me just trying to figure out why I didn’t sound like the version of me that I felt inside.

And if you’ve ever felt that mismatch — where you know your stuff but your voice betrays your confidence —

you’re not alone.

It’s fixable.

And sometimes, you don’t need a coach. You just need a mirror.

👉 pitchmirror.souravlayek.com (if you’re curious where that story ended up)