ACE Comm Apps Tony Gentry Transcription provided by: Caption First, Inc. >> TONY GENTRY: Welcome to a VCU Autism Center of Excellence video log. Let's look at some speech assistance tools that cost little or nothing. Some of the questions you'll want to think about when you're considering one of these apps, is it age appropriate? How do you get to it and use it? Does it use pictures or words or both? Can you create a library of phrases? How easy to use is it? Can you choose your voices or even create your own voice as one of the voices on the device? And when you play it back, can you hear it? When we think about aug com devices, we typically think about freestanding computers like the DynaVox, the Toby, or the GoTalk. This is not what we're talking about today. We're talking about downloadable apps that play on Apple products: the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad. The Ferrari of the Apple apps is Proloquo2Go which is competitive with some of the freestanding devices in terms of its functionality. Because it costs $190, it doesn't fit our discussion today where we're talking about more inexpensive products, but it does bear looking at as it is a very full- featured product. We'll first look at TapToTalk. This app runs on Apple products and on the Nintendo DS. Downloading from the app store you get a free product with a basic library. The designers would like you to go to their website and access a subscription service for their entire library of icons and words for about $100 a year. This is what their basic package looks like. Let's start one, "hungry." >> VOICE: I'm hungry. I want a vegetable. Some celery, please. >> TONY GENTRY: Let's go back. Go back again. Go "home." >> VOICE: Let's go. I want to go to a movie. >> TONY GENTRY: So you get the picture about how that works. Let's look at Talk Assist, another free app. This one without a subscription service. Talk Assist is not icon based, it's language based and it's, as you can see, very straightforward. You type something in, and then you tap "speak." >> VOICE: Hello. >> TONY GENTRY: One voice, robotic. Here's the trick though, you can create a history, tap "history," of all the phrases you've typed and that's available to you to repeat when you need it. Here's one: >> VOICE: His book is blue. >> TONY GENTRY: That's a free app. The most expensive app we'll look at is VoiceForYou. This is a really versatile picture and text based library of sounds and phrases that you can create for yourself and pull from their online library, $30 at the App Store. You can see it's icon and language based. There's a library of phrases that come with. You tap the picture, you get the picture again and you tap it. >> VOICE: Can you help me? Classroom. >> TONY GENTRY: You can also create your own. Let's do that. Tap "add," choose an image, this will come from your image library or you can take a picture on your camera. Let's just take one from the album. A Mardi Gras Indian. And you can say what the picture represents. Mardi Gras Indian. Play it. >> VOICE: Mardi Gras Indian. >> TONY GENTRY: See, that's my voice. You can type in what it says. And then put it in a category where you want it to go. It's ready for you to play. Tap "done," the item's saved. Now we'll go to that category and play it. Tap "category" at the bottom. Find "people." There's my Indian. >> VOICE: Mardi Gras Indian. >> TONY GENTRY: This way you can create an entire library of specialized or individualized phrases with pictures to go along with them. And, as I said before, this is a $30 app. Now let's look at Speak It!, a $1.99 app on the App Store. Speak It! is designed as a PDF reader but it works very well as a speech generator too. Here you can choose a voice: Heather, American female voice; Graham, British male voice; Lucy, British female voice; and Ryan, American male voice. Let's pick Ryan, the American male voice for this morning. And you tap "Speak It!" at the bottom and he reads what's on the page. >> VOICE: I need to go to the bathroom. >> TONY GENTRY: Very emphatic. Then if you want to type something else you can do that as well. "Clear text," type in something else. >> VOICE: Hello. >> TONY GENTRY: If you like what you've typed you can also save that to a library. There's this little icon at the bottom that shows an arrow sticking out of a page, you tap that. Tap "save it." If you reorient the screen so that it's in landscape mode, you'll see on the left-hand side, all of the phrases that have been saved as a library of phrases are available to you. When you turn it back to portrait mode that goes away so the only way to access it is turning it to landscape. But we've got it, you can tap it. >> VOICE: May I have a snack? >> TONY GENTRY: And that's Heather's voice, the American female. So Speak It!, if you're able to type, can be a very straightforward and easy to use speech generator with library. Here's an out of the ordinary speech aid, iBaldi, $0.99 at the App Store. He's an interesting guy, you're looking at his cut-away view. iBaldi is also a PDF reader. And also something of a speech and language pathologists' dream in that when he talks, if you're using the cut-away view, you can watch his tongue and mouth move as a way of teaching people how to speak more clearly. Here's an example. >> VOICE: Hi there, my name is Baldi. Welcome to the iBaldi application. Baldi is an animated character who can read any text with extraordinarily accurate mouth and face movements and convincing emotions. Here are a few tips to get you started. >> TONY GENTRY: So that's iBaldi. When you tap the screen you can turn him around, he can change his settings. For instance, you can change his facial appearance to show emotions. You can turn the inside view off so he's back to being a normal-looking solid human being. Fear, disgust, anger. Let's see what that looks like. So you can conceivably use iBaldi as a teaching tool for recognizing human emotions. In order to use him as a speech generator you would have to create a PDF and import it to iBaldi and that's explained in the settings. We'll end this discussion with my buddy, Talking Tom. Talking Tom is not a speech generation tool in any traditional sense, but he does seem to have a role to play in the world of speech augmentation and autism. Tom repeats what you say. >> VOICE: Tom repeats what you say. >> TONY GENTRY: He responds to being nice, he doesn't like –- >> VOICE: Meow! >> TONY GENTRY: -- being treated badly. You can give him milk. >> VOICE: (Drinks milk) Ahh! >> TONY GENTRY: And you can even record what he says and send it to your friends on Twitter. >> VOICE: You can even record what he says and send it to your friends –- >> TONY GENTRY: Why is Talking Tom a teaching tool? >> VOICE: Why is Talking Tom a teaching tool? >> TONY GENTRY: My thought would be that if you are –- >> VOICE: My thought would be that if you are –- >> TONY GENTRY: -- learning to speak –- >> VOICE: -- learning to speak –- >> TONY GENTRY: -- Tom might encourage you to speak –- >> VOICE: -- Tom might encourage you to speak –- >> TONY GENTRY: -- and would mirror back to you –- >> VOICE: -- and would mirror back to you –- >> TONY GENTRY: -- what you say. >> VOICE: -- what you say. >> TONY GENTRY: So in addition to encouraging kids to speak and mirroring back what they say, Talking Tom has a couple of other interesting uses. He may be used in some ways to help kids understand how people respond to their behavior. He may also be used for kids who are just beginning to get comfortable with an iPad as a tool to help them learn to navigate the device. Of course no speech generation tool will work if the other person cannot hear it. Two good solutions for that, I'm a big fan of iMainGo which is a carrying case for the iPod Touch and the iPhone or any other PDA; $15 at Wal-mart with nice speakers that make good sound of any sound coming out of the device. I know there is the Cyanics earphone ears which is $23 on Amazon. You can use the Cyanics case as a stand, but it's really there as a set of speakers playing back whatever the device is saying. Before I go, let me just say this, speech production difficulties are very complex problems that involve cognition, motor control, and all sorts of other things. It's very important to confer with a speech and language pathologist to find out whether one of these apps may help, one of the more expensive free-standing devices may help, or some other strategy may help. It's also helpful to talk to an occupational therapist about the way the device will be managed in a person's everyday life. If you do that, I think that's the best approach to making sure your child has exactly the right product to help them move forward in their efforts. I wish you good luck in pursuing augmentative communication solutions. This is Tony Gentry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thank you.