Voice4u Review

A bit ago I was approached to do a review for Voice4u. Created by a special needs child's mom, Voice4u is an amazing little AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) program that helps children who can't communicate to have a voice of their own. Since Dakin is admittedly behind in speech, we have toyed with some AAC devices in the hopes of enabling him to communicate more freely, but this one is in a class of its own!

You download it to your iPhone or iPod touch, and from there all you have to do is scroll to the icon you'd like to use. Check out the pics: they're super cute.

All you have to do is touch the screen and your device will say the word pictured. It's great!! Now, the program comes with a ton of preloaded pics: emotions, things, greetings, etc., but one of the coolest features is that you can add to the library! Right away we added Dada, Mama, Jane, color and car. You can record your own voice saying the item as well.

You can even redo the existing pictures: if you want a specific picture for car, like we did, all we did was take a pic of our own car, record our sound bit saying 'car', and there we were!

Voice4u is incredibly easy to use, and our nurse Jane, who by her own admission is technologically challenged, started using the whole program right away. Dakin really enjoys it as well, and loves touching the screen over and over to say his favorite items.

The ease of use is added to by the touch nature of the iPod Touch and iPhone--even a soft touch, which is all Dakin can manage, is enough to make it work.

The only difficulties we experienced using this product is one that can't, unfortunately, be avoided with Dakin: the iPhone screen is so small, he would never be able to hit the buttons on his own, as he has little by way of individual finger movement. However, I think this problem (which is, again, only a problem for us) would be solved by using an iPad, which is much larger. I think it would be perfect then! I think due to the physical issues, the program is just a touch ahead of him at the moment, but as he gets older we are looking forward to being able to use it more and more, and especially once we get an iPad and the program is available for it.

Thanks again, Voice4u, for letting us try out your program! It's great!!!

If you're interested in purchasing Voice4u, you can find it on iTunes and in the App Store.