A voice for people who can't rely on speech.
Oso Voice is a communication app for iPhone and iPad. Tap a picture, hear the word, build a sentence. It is built on published AAC research, it keeps everything on the device, and it never stops speaking.
What we hold to
Every design choice in Oso Voice traces back to a written principle, and every principle traces back to evidence. These are the ones that shape the app most.
Core words first
A small set of high-frequency words sits in fixed, always-reachable positions, so most everyday sentences need almost no navigation.
Buttons never move
Once a word has a place on the grid it keeps it. Vocabulary grows by revealing hidden cells, never by reshuffling the ones a person has learned.
Nothing is gated, ever
One purchase includes everything. No subscription, no in-app purchases, and no state in which the app stops speaking.
Private by design
Nothing leaves the device. No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party services. The policy is one page long.
For any age
Used by children and by adults. Set up by the caregivers, speech-language pathologists and school teams around them. Never age-banded.
Sensory-safe defaults
A calibrated low-arousal palette ships alongside the standard one, because maximum contrast is not better for everyone.
We show our work
The research behind the app is published here as it is written: what the field does, what the evidence says, and what we decided because of it.
TTS Voices in Pediatric AAC on iOS — Vendor Suppliers, Apple System Voices, Licensing, and Clinical Evidence (plus custom words with photos)
Why Oso Voice's voice picker shows Apple novelty voices ("Whisper") and how to filter them; which voice vendors the major pediatric AAC apps use (Acapela child voices dominate); what Apple exposes on iOS 17/18 (no genuine child voice; Personal Voice is a self-clone, not a stock voice); what licensing a child voice would require (Acapela iOS SDK, annual fee plus royalties, offline-capable); clinical evidence that age/gender-matched voices drive acceptance. Also records the /slp ruling on caregiver-added custom words with photos.
AAC Folder Navigation — Vendor Alignment Check for ADR 009
Verifies the five ADR 009 navigation/taxonomy decisions against how Proloquo2Go, TD Snap Core First, TouchChat/WordPower, LAMP Words for Life, Grid 3/Super Core, CoughDrop and Avaz handle folder overflow, alphabetical ordering, body-state words, pronouns/wh-words and Places. Four decisions match field practice; nesting body states inside Feelings diverges from the dominant separate Body/Health pattern. Addendum verifies the v2.4.1 page-1 priority order against published core-vocabulary lists and vendor first-page rules.
AAC Within-Category Organization — Vendor Scan, Clinical Grounding, Proposed Taxonomy
Vendor survey (Proloquo/Proloquo2Go, WordPower, LAMP/Unity, TD Snap, Grid 3/Grid for iPad, CoughDrop, Avaz, Speak for Yourself) and evidence synthesis on how large fringe categories are subdivided once they overflow one grid page, plus a proposed functional-subfolder taxonomy for Oso Voice's 5 remaining uncurated categories (descriptors, people, food, feelings, places).