App: iToucan Talk
Developer: Android in London
Platform: Android, no iOS version (Available in 12 Languages Including Spanish)
Price: Free on Google Play
Category: AAC Autism App
Android Autism App Works Wonders!
The iToucan Talk application, an Android-specific (no iOS version), is honestly the best AAC application that we have ever reviewed! I’m not exaggerating! Things are easy to find, the icons are representative of the words below them, and there are tons of pictographs to choose from! The app is free, and it’s just put together very nicely thanks to the people over at Android in London.
How To Use iToucan Talk
When you first open the application after installing it from Google Play (the app title is linked to the Google Play page), you will need to wait for about 20 mb of files to download. After this, you will have three choices: download pictographs, select language, and pick language and launch app.
Before you do anything, be sure to hit download pictographs. If you don’t download these, then you won’t have the full selection of objects, verbs, and emotions to work with!
Once you’ve downloaded all of the pictographs (this shouldn’t take very long) you can go ahead and pick a language from the myriad of choices and then launch the app. The application is actually very simple and easy to use, which is one of its strong points. At first, things might seem difficult to find, but once you understand the organization, the app works wonderfully!
How iToucan Talk is Organized
The first page that you come to is the people page. This lists all of the people that a child with autism would ever need to reference in communication. If you swipe to the right, you’ll see that there is a page dedicated to verbs, a page dedicated to questions/how/why, and a page dedicated to objects. This makes it very easy for children on the spectrum to find what they’re looking for! (Anyways, you’d be surprised at how quickly these kids can memorize where the items are – I’ve seen people on the spectrum use AAC boards faster than I can follow what they’re trying to tell me!)
Yes, iToucan Talk even reads the sentence that you have created with the pictographs! Just press the speech bubble in the top right hand corner of your device to make it talk.
Overall, an Awesome Application!
I wish that this were available on the App Store for all of you iPad and iPhone users, but this one’s a special gift to those with Android devices. (Read my recent post on the Nexus 7 and autism.) This Android AAC application makes finding things simple, and I’m sure that it would help anyone who is non-verbal!
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