Advancements in technology over the last decade have made our lives even better. Regardless of its genre, each app development works towards either making our lives easy or providing means to make it easy. We talk about the facilities and ease of living provided by these apps. To talk, we move our lips, tongue, jaws to create a sound that is recognizable in a specific language and a combination of such sounds later becomes words and sentences. However, many people across the world struggle to speak and express themselves correctly. For such adults, teens, and kids, speech therapy is like a holy grail.
Speech therapy is being practiced by millions of practitioners around the globe that are working towards the treatment of several speech and language challenges. Speech therapy treatment is availed by people who face communication difficulties, aphasia, learning disorders, etc. However, there are many speech impairments that can be caused by disease, injury, or prior medical treatment.
The Healthcare sector has been revolutionized by modern technology, and there are various apps that are used for the treatments of various diseases. Speech therapy apps are used to cure different types of communication difficulties such as speech articulation, fluency, intensity, voice, etc., and language, which includes pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, etc.
Speech therapy apps are helping people across the world, and the demand for such apps is increasing. There are various free speech therapy apps that are helping people in getting treated remotely at the comfort of their home. If you are planning to develop the best speech therapy app, this is the right time.
What is Speech Therapy?
Speech therapy is a form of treatment that deals with the diagnosis of speech or communication difficulties in adults, teens, and kids. These therapies work towards the treatment of people facing communication difficulties along with Aphasia, Apraxia, Dysarthria, lisping, Stuttering, speech delay, lisping, etc.
Aphasia is a neurological based disorder that includes comprehension or articulation difficulties. Apraxia is known as a speech-sound disorder, and childhood Apraxia and Acquired Apraxia of Speech are its most common types. Dysarthria, commonly known as poor phonation or abnormal speech.
As per the data of NIDCD of USA, nearly 5 percent of children between the ages 3 to 17 possess a speech disorder that has lasted from a week to as long as 12 months. In terms of stuttering, the figure crosses over 3 million people that stutter. Although, it is not something that is particular to any age as it can affect individuals of all ages. Children between the ages of 2 and 6 are most prone to such disorder.
In terms of gender, boys are more likely to stutter than girls. However, most of the children outgrow these difficulties, and one in four will continue to stutter past the age of 10. These conditions can be treated with the help of the best speech therapy apps. If you are thinking about developing such apps, let’s get to know the most famous speech therapy apps prevailing in the market.
Most Popular Speech Therapy Apps in 2021
Language and speech therapy apps are helping young and adults who are suffering from various speech difficulties. The best apps in this genre are the ones that offer support and encourage their SLPs or therapists to enhance their speech, language, communication, and feeding skills. Here is the list of top speech therapy apps.
1. Little Bee
Little Bee Speech is one of the most popular articulation apps that is crafted for children. This app helps the children in learning to pronounce and practice different sounds. The app offers several levels to users that include word, sentence, and story. These levels are offered in 22 sounds and start with the initial, medium, and final levels. To ensure enough practice, all the levels consist of a minimum of 60 words.
Little Bee offers users six different activities such as Flashcards that include practicing sounds with over 1,300+ pictures, Level 1 stories that include short and silly rhymes with pictures, and questions related to comprehension. Further comes the Level 2 that offers comprehension questions from short and creative stories. There are several other features that you can customize as per the need of your child.
2. Splingo
The Splingo app is another popular app in this genre. It is designed for children and teaches them a new way of learning listening and language skills. This app offers a unique and interactive game with the theme of aliens and spaceships. Splingo focuses on learning nouns, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives and is designed with the assistance of various speech therapists. This speech therapy app for kids comes with different level and have four different levels designed for different age groups.
The level in Splingo app starts from level 1 that is suitable for children older than 18 months, and uses one main word. Level 2 is suitable for kids of age two to three years, and it focuses on two main words. Level 3 uses three central words and is suitable for children of age three to four years. The Last and the final level, Level 4, comes with four main words and is suitable for children of age four or older.
3. Speech Tutor
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Speech Tutor is one of the fun apps in this genre. It offers treatment using 2-D animated movies to see each sound production made without the use of the tongue. This technique helps the users to learn where to place their tongues or move their throats to make a particular sound. It may sound simple, but it is something that you can’t do on your own.
Users are delivered with over 132 animations, and they can select a particular sound and see how it’s made. Further, users can practice that movement and improve that particular sound. Apart from this innovative way of treatment, it comes with various tips from prominent licensed pathologists or SLP’s. Further, this app allows users to play a movie at three different speeds and practice a particular sound and record themselves; the app will analyze the recording and give feedback.
4. Conversation Therapy
The Conversation Therapy app is one of the most famous speech therapy apps for adults. This app focuses on improving conversations between individuals with small or large groups. The Conversation Therapy app is designed for adults that are facing difficulty in expressing themselves. These people include stroke survivors, people with speech or language impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s, people with Autism and Asperger’s, traumatic brain injury, etc.
Users can choose from the 12 categories of interest, including hobbies, health, current events, etc. After the selection of the category, a picture will be displayed on the screen along with ten buttons, and users can touch any of them to see the questions. The app’s database consists of more than 300 pictures, and each picture consists of 10 questions ranging from easy to difficult in terms of phonetics. If you combine all the 12 categories, you’ll end up with more than 3000 questions.
5. Naming Therapy
People that have suffered a stroke in their lifetime often find it difficult to recall names of people and words for everyday objects. Naming Therapy is an app designed for such people to overcome these difficulties. The app comes with four parts to help stroke survivors to practice recall skills. These four parts are designed in a stepwise progression.
The first part is named Describe that assists the people in learning to describe any item to someone else by answering questions related to those items. The second part is Flashcards that consists of more than 700 pictures that users can flip through and practice saying. All the user has to do is touch the picture, and the app will read its name.
The Third part is Naming practice that encourages users to practice naming more than 400 pictures independently. In case they didn’t get it right, the app will deliver them cues to find the name. The fourth part is the Naming Test that allows users to take a screentest and count the number of images they can name.
Features to be Included in the Development of a Speech Therapy App
The success or popularity of any app depends on the quality of its features. Your app should possess the most artistic and efficient features that can help the users and awe them at the same time. Here are some of the features that should be considered while building a speech therapy app.
1. Onboarding
A user should know an overview of your app to access it properly. Displaying a few slides with operating instructions at the start of the application will help the users in making the most of the app. Further, your app should consist of a registration form where users will fill in their basic details such as name, age, etc. Being a therapy app, your app should ask the users about their goals to achieve through this app. Apart from a registration form, you can deliver them the option to sign-up with their existing social media handles.
2. In-built Payments
A therapy app always has some sessions that are chargeable. However, there are various free speech therapy apps available that have a different source of revenue generation. To facilitate the users the ease of payment, your app must have an internal payment option that allows transactions through different modes of payment. You can ask your app development company to integrate this feature into your project.
3. Rewarding Systems
The people you will be catering to requires motivation to improve. Various reward points on the completion of a task will help boost their morale and increase your app’s popularity. These rewards can be in the form of points, badges, coupons, etc. You can start a leaderboard and show the performance of a group only to its members with their badges. In another case, you can tie up with a brand to deliver their products as rewards and pay you for their promotion.
4. Voice Recognition
In the genre of speech therapy apps, voice recognition is the most crucial feature. This feature will help users to record their voices correctly in a practice session. You can take this feature further and link it with AI to enhance functionalities. Users with speech difficulties find this feature very ergonomic. You can take the help of voice recognition software or ask your development company to integrate this feature.
5. Video Streaming
Several speech therapy app for kids offer a video streaming of 2-D movies or animation videos that helps them overcome their difficulties. Your efficient app should contain a video-streaming feature that can play videos. Video streaming can work wonders for such patients, hence making this feature a must-have.
6. In-Built Chat or Call
There are times when people with difficulties need expert assistance. In such cases, various apps deliver them an option to chat or call with expert SLP’s or therapists. You never know when a user will need expert guidance or consultation; integrating a chat or call feature in your app will take the popularity to the next level. The users can interact with their favorite SLP to get assistance with any activity or to take a consultation.
7. Customer Support
Customer satisfaction is what makes an app popular. Users often encounter problems on various apps related to its functionality, and customer support to resolve their issues instantly will help in the reputation building of your app. The problems can be related to payments, the functioning of activity, etc. You always have the option to deliver a detailed guide over every activity present in your app.
8. TalkBack
The users of best speech therapy apps are used to this feature as it helps them get the correct pronunciation of an item. The users later practice matching the sound. This feature is a must-have for the apps of the speech impairment treatment genre. Kids love this feature as it serves the purpose of amusement and learning for them. You can take this feature to the next level with machine learning and train your app to analyze the pronunciation’s quality of the word spoken by the user and present them with good suggestions.
Development Process
Any therapy app development comes with a set of challenges as the primary motive is to deliver adequate treatments to the user through this platform. To deliver an efficient treatment, intriguing research is required. Since there are many players on this ground, you need to identify the features and strategies they are following. Identify your target audience, try to find out their expectations from such an app, and point out the mistakes and irrelevant features in the existing apps. You always have the option of hiring a market research team that will do that for you. However, conducting a market research with the help of your in-house team will make a significant impact and save resources as well.
Now that you have all the critical points noted from the outcome of that efficient market research, move forward to carve a road map. This road map will serve the purpose of a blueprint for your speech therapy app. Following the road map, you can organize a brainstorming session with your team members and come out with crucial decisions like a number of features to be included, budget for the project, and whether to hire a professional team of app developers from a reputed mobile app development company or hiring a freelance app development team.
After all the decisions have been finalized, you can proceed towards the next step, deciding the platforms on which your app will be launched as per the stats majority of speech therapy apps for kids are operating on iOS.
1. Technologies To Consider
The backbone of any app development process is the technology stack embedded into the project. A number of technologies are available out there for the development of an efficient speech impairment treatment app. First, you have to make sure that the front end of your app is alluring enough to the customers. It should deliver all the features the users are missing.
For the technologies, you can choose to form various technologies that are used in this genre such as Apache for web servers, Bootstrap, Google Analytics, PHP language, Google Tag Managers, WordPress for CMS, Slick, WP Rocket, YouTube for video streaming, jQuery, jQuery Migrate, MySQL for database, etc.
For the purpose of integrating voice recognition in your app, you can use various speech recognition engines such a CMU Sphinx, Microsoft SAPI, IBM ViaVoice, etc.
2. Monetization
Any app, regardless of its genre, can be monetized in various ways. The primary or secondary motive behind any app development is generating revenue. There are various Monetization methods that you can apply in your app development process to generate significant revenue.
Freemium: It is the most feasible and ergonomic revenue model. Your app delivers some features for free to the users and reserves some of the advanced features for the premium category. When a user asks for access to those advanced features, your app will come up with various charges related to them. In simple terms, this model is free and premium and the same time. Free plus premium, freemium, get it?
Advertisement: The most traditional way of generating profit is through advertisements. It can be of various types; you can either partner with a brand and advertise their products on the platform that are relevant to the users. The second option is to display ads on every page that are related to the fields of the app. Try not to use this too many ads, as it gets irritating for the users.
Sponsorships: If your app is among the popular list, you can easily attract various brands for sponsorships. Your app can behave like a promotional channel for its products.
Consultations: You can create a network of SLPs or speech therapists and allow users to book a consultation. The SLPs will get their share, and your app will deduct a percentage. You can apply the same to the medicines or other pieces of equipment used during the course of treatment.
3. Cost to Develop
As much as you try to analyze the cost of your app development process, you’ll end up with an estimate. The cost factor is variable and relies on various factors. These factors include a number of features, number of platforms, selection of app development company, etc.
The number of features and their functionality will affect the cost, along with the features; the number of platforms you want to launch your app on will also fluctuate the cost. Cross-platform development will always be costlier than a single platform development.
The mobile app development company will also make a significant impact on the budget of your project development. A full-fledged app development organization will cost you more than middle-rank companies, but they will deliver you a product with elegant qualities and flawlessly engineered performance. These companies offer you a free maintenance period and 24×7 customer support.
The region in which you are planning to develop your app will also impact the price. For instance, development charges in Europe are higher than the development charges in the USA.
Wrapping Up
With the advancement in technologies, numerous speech software solutions have been developed over the years that help patients reach their goals. These solutions cover treatment for every difficulty people face, such as stroke rehabilitation, non-verbal behavior, aphasia, second-language pronunciation, etc. Along with the treatment, these apps offer a lot of innovative features, from video modeling to structured lessons and more. The market is thriving with apps, but there is still enough room for a new app with elegant features and performance.
Matellio can help you with the development of your speech therapy app. With our proficient team of app developers, we deliver advanced features with flawlessly engineered performance. Our highly trained engineers are well-rehearsed with the genre of speech software solutions. We have developed several excellent speech therapy apps for kids and adults with great ratings and customer reviews. Connect to us and get started with your app development right away.
