iAutism

Legend, developer of OneVoice – AAC, is a software design and user experience firm that claims their designs are clear and have high quality. In fact, Legend works for other companies making designs for them. After reviewing OneVoice and its website, we have to recognize they are truly good at this.

Besides its interface, OneVoice is an interesting AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) app. It has many common elements with other AAC apps, but it includes some aspects that make it worth taking a look.

In short, OneVoice follows the paradigm of building sentences based on selecting one or typically multiple images. What makes OneVoice different is that the sentence appears in text form only, and that you can also enter text directly. This makes OneVoice a useful AAC app for users that, while appreciate a communication system based on images classified into categories, can also read and even appreciate that the phrase is written in plain text instead of being shown as a sequence of images.

This makes us think about neurotypical people who have lost their speech capability for some reason or, for example, people with special needs who cannot speak but probably can read and write with some fluency.

A unique screen
Once started, OneVoice shows a communication screen that is also the unique full screen included in this app. If you are holding an iPad in landscape mode, you will see on the left the list of categories of vocabulary and, on the right, the images-phrases of the selected category. By default, the “Needs & Wants” category, that includes some basic vocabulary, is checked.

By selecting images from one or more categories you can build a sentence, which will appear in the top box only in text format.

When you finish the sentence, you can touch the ‘Speak’ button, so that OneVoice reads the sentence aloud.  If you prefer, there is an editing option that will allow you to speak each word as selected.

As we have said at the beginning of this review, you can also touch the top box to display the standard keyboard of the iPad and enter text directly. The advantage of this system is that you can even add words in the middle of the sentence you have created based on selecting images. So you can add an adjective or a preposition, for example. You can also copy and paste text from other applications and use the integrated word prediction feature.

The screen has only two more buttons: one to delete the current written sentence, and another to access the settings. The latter will show some small overlapping windows on top of the main screen that, remember, is the only full screen of OneVoice. Here, too, the author looks for simplicity. From the settings you can, for example, select bigger images for the images that accompany each category.

If you use an iPad in portrait mode, the category is selected from a dropdown list, leaving more space for images in each category.

OneVoice also works for the iPhone. The smaller screen means that the app first shows the categories and then the images of the selected category, but the app itself has a very similar operation mode.

Details
In addition to simplicity, there are some hidden strengths that should be noted. OneVoice requires 233 MB, and this is largely because it includes four high quality natural voices (one male adult, one male child, and two female) that allow  an accurate English pronunciation for a much wider vocabulary than the small number of phrases with associated images preloaded suggests.  A demo of each voice (Ryan, Kenny, Laura, Heather) is available at http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html, where the voices are referred to as “American English speech synthesis” voices.

From ‘Settings’ you can choose what voice you want to use and its speed. The same screen allows you to decide whether each word should be pronounced as you add each image or only when you press the ‘Speak’ button.

Vocabulary
OneVoice includes a preloaded vocabulary of only 223 items, a good set for children or youth, covering basic needs. But clearly OneVoice does not have an extensive vocabulary. Any user will have to add dozens of images. For example, there are only 15 images in the food category and 13 for actions.

The high quality and type of illustrations deserve to be highlighted. Where other applications use very schematic pictograms or drawings only suitable for children, OneVoice includes realistic illustrations.

The vocabulary is initially divided into 15 categories. The user can create new categories, but not subcategories. Again, simplicity shows everywhere. The name of each category cannot be too long –more than 20 characters– or will appear truncated. And if an image has been chosen to appear in front of the category name, there will be less room for the full name to appear on the screen.

If you select the Edit mode from ‘Settings’, the single screen of OneVoice will change a bit. Next to each category, two icons appear that allow you to delete categories or move them up and down. You can also delete any image-phrase in that category or relocate it, and also add new categories.

And, of course, you can add new images within a category. A small window appears and shows six tabs with -surprisingly- only a subset of the preloaded phrases. But it is the ‘Custom’ tab that allows you to add your own pictures.

As usual in many apps, pictures can be taken from the library of images of the device. Not so usual, you also have the option to scale the image and take just a piece of it. Using an iPhone or an iPad 2, you may add images based on photographs taken directly using the built-in camera. Apart from the picture, you have to write the text or phrase associated with it.

This way of editing all at once is very powerful, so as a precaution you can decide to use a code to access it. The code is perfectly visible, so the only thing that you will accomplish using it is to avoid entering the edit mode accidentally, and not really to prevent an unauthorized user entering the edit mode. We would have liked the option to actually block access to the edit mode using a secret code.

During our evaluation of OneVoice, we discovered that when adding images, only 24 could reside in the “Custom” images at one time.  The developer acknowledges that this limitation is a bug that affects some users and is working on an update. Until the update is available, once imported images are placed in a desired category, they will likely need to be removed from their temporary location in “Custom” images.   In other words, once the 24-item limit in “Custom” is reached, the option to “Use” additional images is disabled until the number of images in “Custom” is reduced. Thankfully, deleting images out of “Custom” will not affect the images that have already been added to other categories.

-Angie Lamb & Francesc Sistach

This post is also available in: Spanish