For parents & caregivers

Everything here assumes no technical background. If you have twenty minutes, the first hour below is the fastest way to a device your child can actually use.

Go to your dashboard What the app does

Setting it up: the first hour

Do these in order. The first two matter more than everything else combined.

1. Add your people. Toolbar → People. Family, pets, teachers, close friends, with photos. Names come up constantly in real conversation and no built-in vocabulary can guess them. The photo shows on the tile; only the name is ever spoken.
2. Add five of your own words. Toolbar → Add Word. The specific things your child cares about — a show, a toy, a food, a place. Add a photo, and answer the "what kind of word is this?" question so the grammar handles it properly. If the word belongs to a topic, open that topic first and file it there, so it appears where your child will look.
3. Trim the pinned row. Toolbar → Pinned. Remove anything your child doesn't use yet. Every pinned word is one they scroll past on every screen, so a shorter row is a faster row.
4. Set the tile size and hold time. Toolbar → Settings. Get the tiles big enough to hit reliably before worrying about anything to do with language.
5. Build the voice. Settings → Voice and speech. Two minutes, and it matters more than you'd expect — it is going to be their voice. Let your child choose between the types if they can.
6. Model it. Build sentences yourself, out loud, on the device. Tap I · want · cookie and press Speak while saying it. This is how AAC is learned. Turn on Supporter modeling in Settings first so your sentences aren't counted as your child's, and turn it off when you hand the iPad back.
7. Try Listening Mode. Press Tap to Listen, ask your child a real question, and see what appears.
8. Save what repeats. When your child builds something they'll say again, press Save to keep it on the home screen.

The three things worth understanding

Instant Words speak immediately

The strip of six under the message bar — yes, no, wait, help, I don't know, stop — speak the moment they're tapped. They don't go into the sentence and they don't wait for the Speak button, because a refusal or a request for help is useless if it arrives late. Every other tile in the app goes into the message bar instead.

Tapping a person twice means "belongs to them"

I · like · I · car is "I like my car". he · like · he · car is "he likes his car". There is no my tile anywhere on purpose — your child never has to learn the difference between I, me and my.

This is the one construction that isn't self-evident, and it's worth five minutes of showing.

The grey chips are the app's words

In the message bar, small grey chips between the word chips are the words the app added — "to", "the", "a", "and". Tap one to switch it off if it's wrong. A word with a line through it is one the app folded into its neighbour (the "no" of "don't"); it's still there, and still removable.

Seeing how it's going

If your child's account is set up, you can sign in here and see a summary of how the app is being used: how many sentences per week, which topics they come from, how many different words, and average sentence length over time. It's counts, not transcripts.

Linking to your child's account

Only your child's account can grant this — you can't look a child up from your side. That's deliberate.

1. Sign in here and choose "I'm a parent / caregiver" when asked who you are.
2. On your child's account, sign in, open "Who can see your reports", and press Generate invite code.
3. Enter that code under Redeem an invite code on your own dashboard.

Codes last seven days and link one person each. Your child's account can see everyone linked to it and remove any of them at any time — the list is theirs, in plain sight, not buried in a setting.

Nothing spoken while Supporter modeling is on appears in the report, so the sentences you model yourself never count as your child's.

Go to your dashboard

Privacy, briefly

The tiles, the grammar and the voice all work with no internet at all. The only part that involves the network is the listening button, which uses the iPad's own speech recognition — so audio may be processed by Apple, the same way dictation is. The app stores no audio and keeps no transcript, nothing is captured unless the button is pressed, and every word is reachable without it.

The longer version →

Accounts

There is nothing to buy inside the app — licensing is arranged by the school or clinic. If no account has been set up at all, that's fine: the app runs completely locally, with no sign-in and no backup, and everything works.

You will never be interrupted mid-conversation. The account is checked only when the app starts, and once it's been verified even once it keeps working offline for months. A dropped Wi-Fi connection is never a lockout.