Bitrise helps Speak move 3x faster with AI

Summary

One of the hardest parts of learning a new language is sounding natural. Nailing the right words, pronunciation, intonation and rhythm takes practice. Lots of it.

Enter Speak, an AI-first language learning app on a mission to give people the real-world practice they need to speak a new language with confidence.

Speak’s app sits at the heart of that mission and is the primary way users experience its AI-powered learning. Keeping that experience smooth and reliable is critical, which is why Speak has relied on Bitrise for seven years to provide the stable CI/CD foundation needed to scale its mobile development successfully.

Now, as AI helps drive a 3x increase in build velocity, that reliability is being tested more than ever. Bitrise has held strong, giving Speak’s mobile team the confidence to move faster while continuing to deliver the high-quality experience learners expect.

Challenge

Founded in 2016, Speak is creating the future of language learning through its AI-powered app. While competitors have layered AI onto existing products, Speak has built its learning experience to be AI-native from the ground up.

The company’s app is the main gateway to its powerful language-learning experience, giving 15 million users access to its suite of voice and video capabilities.

To stay ahead in the market, the company has made mobile a strategic priority and as a result its team forms a core part of its wider engineering organization. This includes the intentional decision to build our apps natively rather than use a cross-platform framework that typically incurs a performance penalty.

As Scott shared, "We have 16 mobile engineers in total, 8 iOS and 8 Android. We also have an increasing number of internal contributors to our products who are now regular contributors to our iOS and Android codebases."

For seven years, Bitrise has provided Speak with a reliable CI as it evolved its offering and expanded across Asia and the US. Its ease of use has been key in helping Speak’s lean mobile team stay focused without losing time to complex setup and configuration.

“One of the key things I really like about Bitrise is the plug-and-play nature of everything. You can specify what machine you want to run on with one line of YAML and that’s it. You don’t have to bring your own machines. Integrations with tools like GitHub are straightforward. And it allows a lean team like ours to set up a new CI really simply, so that's a huge plus.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

AI accelerates code but shifts the bottlenecks

Over the past year, Speak’s growing use of AI pushed build volume up more than 3x, from 4,000 builds a month in July 2025 to 15,000 in July 2026. PR volume also surged, reaching 382 across July and August, while monthly contributors grew from 11 to 28.

“We can do a lot more with AI now. After six-plus months of agentic coding, writing code by hand feels slow. It has significantly compressed the development timeline.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

With AI accelerating code generation like never before, Speak’s mobile team faced a new set of challenges. More code meant more pressure further down the pipeline, with extra time needed for review, verification and testing to keep quality high.

"AI has made coding so much faster now, but it has led to other bottlenecks in other areas. One of those is code review, but another is ensuring that all the additional code gets built, tested and rolled out safely, especially as the amount of code we generate continues to increase." 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

This surge in velocity also put additional pressure on Bitrise CI to maintain performance, reliability, and quality, allowing Speak to focus on scaling its AI use without having to worry about CI becoming a stumbling block.

Solution

Bitrise CI holds firm as build volume triples

As AI accelerates the volume of code Speak produces, Bitrise has remained stable and reliable with no drop in performance. The fact that Bitrise workflows are composed from steps in plain YAML, make it easy for Speak’s mobile engineers to understand and, now increasingly, for its AI agents to work with too, allowing the team to scale up use of AI without friction.

“Bitrise is just really easy to work with. If you want to run a build, you can do it. If you want to run tests, you can do it. If you want to parallelize, it’s easy. The fact that it is all done in YAML, which is just plain text, means that AI agents can also easily understand it and make any necessary changes.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

Faster issue resolution with Bitrise MCP

As coding has become faster, Speak’s mobile team has continued to evolve its use of Bitrise to fully optimize the mobile CI process. A failed build once meant clicking through GitHub and digging through logs. Now Speak uses the Bitrise MCP server so our AI agents can investigate builds directly.

“We now use Bitrise MCP and it makes it easy to involve AI agents to monitor a particular build and alert the team if it succeeds or fails. Or investigate why a PR failed, then fix it and push it back up again. These high-level workflows are so powerful because they save so much time investigating, understanding, and bug-fixing on the engineer's part.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

With Bitrise, Speak’s engineers can set higher-level goals while allowing AI agents to handle more of the build, test and verification loops.

“Now our AI agents can ask Bitrise, ‘How did this build do? What failed?’ and then go back and fix it. That’s a big qualitative change in how we work.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

Stable CI built for rapid change

That ability to keep pace has become increasingly important as AI-driven development has pushed Speak from 4,000 to 15,000 builds a month. Through that increase, Bitrise has remained stable and given the team the flexibility to scale resources when needed, with Bitrise Insights giving Speak visibility into build times and volume as demand has grown.

“Even with an influx of new code and developers contributing to our codebase, Bitrise has stayed really stable for us. It also gives us the flexibility to switch machine types or add more CPUs depending on our needs, all with just a single line change.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

As the team moves faster, rapid access to new Apple toolchains also helps prevent CI from becoming another bottleneck.

“Some CI providers are incredibly slow in adopting new Xcode versions or new toolchains in general. With Bitrise, Xcode 27 was available within days of the first beta being launched back in June. Being able to get started early with that is a huge win, because sometimes you just have some big changes to make, and the earlier you can start that process the better. If that becomes a bottleneck it can cause real issues. Thankfully, that is never an issue with Bitrise." 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

Results

“With the increase in velocity AI has brought over the past year, Bitrise has been a constant for us. It’s given us the reliability we need to keep scaling our use of AI with confidence.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

• Reliable CI through a 3.75x surge in build volume - Bitrise scaled to meet demand from 4,000 to 15,000 builds per month as AI accelerated development across Speak’s mobile teams.
• Stable CI as PR velocity increased 3.6x - as average monthly PR volume climbed from 54 in Q1 2026 to 191 in Q3 of the same year, Bitrise continued to provide a stable, reliable foundation without disruption.
• Quality kept pace with AI-driven velocity - Speak increased test coverage from 4% to 40%, with Bitrise providing the build and testing infrastructure needed to verify a rapidly growing volume of code.
• Bitrise enables AI agents to drive faster fixes and higher quality - through Bitrise MCP, Speak’s coding agents can monitor builds, investigate failures and make fixes quickly, helping the team maintain quality as development scales.
• Easy scaling as CI requirements change - Speak can increase machine capacity, adjust CPU requirements and parallelize workloads with ease through its Bitrise configuration as engineering demand grows.
• Early access to new Xcode versions - new toolchains available within days of Apple's first beta, enable Speak’s mobile team to move ahead fast with major platform changes.

The future

As Speak expands its use of agentic coding, the team expects AI agents to take on more of the development workflow independently, from implementing changes to building, testing and resolving failures directly.

“What I’d like for us to productionize more over the coming months is the ability for agents to work more independently, without necessarily needing a lot of human or engineering input.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

With the increase in velocity through AI, the Speak team are now turning their attention to taking advantage of the latest AI models and advancements to continue to improve the experience and make it as natural as possible for its growing community of language learners.

"Any improvement in AI models is always super interesting to us. With better voice models, conversations become more natural and immersive for users, and our learning methods and AI tutors become more effective. That’s where we see the platform going as these models improve.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}

Looking to the future, Speak sees its partnership with Bitrise continuing to strengthen and hopes to tap further into the team’s deep mobile expertise and insights from its diverse customer base to understand the latest trends and winning strategies.

"We can learn a lot from what other companies are doing in the mobile space, and Bitrise can help us do that much better than we could alone. It can provide deep expertise and broader insight into the trends it sees across its customer base, what others are doing to optimize mobile strategies, and which tactics might also work for us. That higher-level view is really invaluable as we continue to grow and advance our offering.” 
_{Scott Berrevoets, iOS Platform Lead, Speak}