Speech recognition tools for children

[healthy11]

Those of us who have tried speech recognition programs to assist young children know that existing programs don't work well before their voices change during puberty. There's word of a new company trying to address those concerns:

www.techcrunch.com/2018/01/13/soapbox-labs/

Dr. Patricia Scanlon, founder of Irish startup SoapBox Labs is on a mission to create what it calls “the world’s most accurate and accessible speech technology for children”, tech it plans to offer to third-party hardware and app developers. These span educational apps that support reading and language development, children’s voice-control for IoT devices in the home, smart toys, and AR/VR experiences... (read the full article for more details)

[kewpie]

Actually a new App just came out specifically addressing this issue.
itunes.apple.com/us/app/sayin-it-sam/id1316194853?mt=8

[healthy11]

It's too bad Sayin It Sam is only available for Apple product users.

[invisibleink]

I tried Dragon with my 11 year old, and it didn’t work for him. It had a really hard time learning his voice and was pretty frustrating to try to use. It was definitely not something you could sit down and start being productive with without a lot of work.

So far the best voice recognition was the apple dictation app. My son doesn’t use it much though. He gets too “stuck” when it misinterprets what he says and it wrecks his train of thought.

We had a lot more success with text prediction, but you do need some basic typing skills for it to work. Maybe we’ll look at the new app if predictive text stops working well for him. Good luck!