Our Aacorn App Review
We got the opportunity to try out the brand new AACORN App. This is an app for children with special needs to help them communicate. The system is revolutionary in a way that it learns to predict what a child wants to say. Build on very modern and smart software, it is a unique program that doesn’t exist yet in the AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) world.
The system works with a “word-tree”. That means when a child start with the first word (for example “I”) it shows words around it that probably are coming next. (like “want, need, can, etc..) This way the child doesn’t need to look for every word in a category or grid. The more you use it, the more the system “learns” what comes next.
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We tried this app with a 3.5 year old girl who is non-verbal, but very eager to communicate. She knows some sign-language and points, grunts and will take you by the hand to get where she wants. She briefly used a grid based system, but was not interested in it at all. However the Aacorn AAC app she picked up like a game. It looks nice, modern and it works very intuitive.
3.5 year old girl exploring the aacorn app
As you can see in the above video, she understands how the “tree” structure works. You can see her shaking her head when she realizes that she took a wrong branch and easily goes back. When a word is not showing up in the word-tree then you can press the + button to go to the categories and add the word to your sentence. And now comes the fun part: next time the child wants to make the same sentence, the word will BE in the word tree, because the system learned that!
| As you can see, she loves working with it and she has surprised us many times with words and sentences that makes clear what see wants. She totally understand that this helps her communicate with us! And she knows better than us where to find the words she wants… |
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AACORN AAC for parents/Speech therapists:
- The Aacorn app is very user friendly. It is easy to add words in the library, make or import photo’s or images. You can even draw your pictures!
- There is a section where it stores the favorite sentences. This is also easy for a child to open and re-use these sentences.
- There is a search bar, most handy for when a word doesn’t show up in the word-tree and it starts to get handy for the children when they are a little bit able to spell. Pressing the first letter will open up all the words with that letter.
- You can also set up multiple users, which is great if you use the system for multiple children.
- There are a lot of settings to adjust the system to your needs, like sound settings, voice settings and lock settings.
- Aacorn comes with lessons to learn your way around the program.
The Aacorn app is still in development and more and more updates and extensions are on the way. In the next update people will be able to lock certain categories, lock the history, there will be more words in the library and so on.
Conclusion or our AACORN review
We are amazed by the way this program “learns” what a child wants to say. The program is very user friendly, is attractive to children, because it almost looks like a game and it can grow with the child. In the beginning the children will use it maybe with just two words and that’s fine too, they don’t have to make whole sentences. They can start with “I want apple” and the system adapts itself and will put those words around the “word-tree”. On the other hand, it can help children build basic grammar like sentence building. We also noticed that the girl in our examples started to repeat the words spoken by the child’s voice. Which is of course a great progress and reinforcement for the development of speech.
When children see this app as a game, they are willing to “play” with it and that’s a great way to learn where to find what and the meaning of the images especially when they cannot read or spell words.
There is no app or system that suits all the children with speech disorders, but this app certainly gives us a fresh, new way of assisting them to communicate.
Where to get more information about this app:
