Version 2.0 of the Speak for Yourself Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app has just been released…FINALLY! We’ve been working on this update for a long, long time. If you were at the American Speech, Language, and Hearing (ASHA) conference in November of 2014, I may have shown you a test version. Seriously. The irony is, at first glance, it won’t look different to current users.
So what’s new?
Even though it doesn’t look different, there have been A LOT of changes. There have been some subtle changes such as minor bug fixes, and we’ve made the search button area larger so that it’s easier to access. The magnifying symbol is the same but the activation area around it is larger.
There are three major areas of functionality that were implemented:
1. A (very short, less-than-30-seconds-to-complete) registration form
2. MULTI-USER
3. In-app purchasing (You may not look at this as a benefit, but this functionality is necessary in order to add options such as additional third party voices).
Please Register!
Version 2.0 contains a registration form. Our goal in collecting information is to support our consumers in their AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) journey by having the ability to provide support and inform them when we increase our product portfolio and release new features in updates. We ask for certain information such as your name, age of the primary AAC user, title (parent, speech-language pathologist, AAC user, other), e-mail address, state/province and country when you register with Speak for Yourself.
This information is not shared or sold to third parties. It is also not published or made public. Here’s our Privacy Policy, if you’d like to know more. When you purchase an app, the only information we get is the country where it was purchased. So, if you’re in the United States, we have no idea if you’re in New Jersey or California. If you’re in Australia, we don’t know if you’re in Darwin or Melbourne. We would like to be able to have an idea of locations and ages of users so we can offer more targeted support.
The alert asking the user to register is only presented 3 times (every two times the app is opened), but after that, you can register at any time by tapping on Options > I Have SfY…Now What?
MULTI-USER!
Finally!! This was no small feat and will mostly be beneficial to professionals or parents who have multiple users. With the update, you receive one additional vocabulary user area for free. This gives everyone a chance to try it out.
Parents, you may find it helpful if you want to import your child’s vocabulary and try some color coding or other changes without affecting your child’s vocabulary. It may also be good for teaching and letting siblings, grandparents, teachers, and support staff explore and learn the app without touching your child’s vocabulary. I’ve seen many parents bring their child’s app to a training and clutch it tightly to protect it from any changes. This way, those parents can switch to the other vocabulary user area and pass it around without worrying.
If you want more than one additional vocabulary user area, we’ve made that available through the other large implementation in 2.0…
In-App Purchasing
You can purchase as many as 40 vocabulary user areas (as long as you have the iPad memory to hold them). The additional areas are sold as bundled slots and are scaffolded (meaning that you purchase slots 3 through 5 before you purchase slots 5 through 10). You may not think of in app purchasing as a benefit, but this development was necessary to be able to include other updates, such as third party voice options.
We’d love to be able to do everything for free, but we had to decide if we were going to increase the price of SfY or charge a nominal fee for the people who want the additional convenience of multi-user. We decreased the price of Speak for Yourself in October 2012 by $100 and haven’t increased it since. We enjoy being able to offer sales to help spread awareness and acceptance on days like yesterday(Apraxia Awareness Day), and the more successful we are, the more generous we can be.
In app purchasing of multi-user doesn’t impact the AAC users or communication functionality of Speak for Yourself directly, so it was a prime feature to implement with in app purchasing. Once you purchase additional vocabulary user areas, you have them for any iPad that is synced to the iTunes account. If you lose your iPad in a New York City cab or it falls off your roof and you run over it, when you re-install Speak for Yourself, any additional vocabulary user areas that you purchase can also be restored.
It will give SLPs a way to trial SfY with multiple students, model vocabulary during sessions on their own iPad, or make changes to individual user vocabularies and then try them out with the user before changing their personalized device. It will allow AAC evaluators to save multiple users so that they can look back at the history of their time with that child when they are writing reports, and if they go forward with a trial of SfY, they can start the child exactly where they left off in the evaluation. Multi-user allows access to all of your SfY user vocabulary areas on a single iPad. The awesome (and developmentally time-consuming) thing about it is that the app remembers everyone’s settings (lock configurations, voice you’re using), history data, saved messages in Hold That Thought, button colors and photos! When you switch between users, all of their information stays with them. It gives you the ability to hold 40 differently-configured Speak for Yourself app configurations in your single iPad.
There’s an updated Programming Guide with step by step directions within the app, and if you’re a better visual learner, here is a video so you can grab your iPad and follow along:
We’re so excited and hope you are too!
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