My Voice: An Augmentative and Alternative Communication Android App for Children with Apraxia in Arab Countries

Abstract

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a disorder that prevents people from talking. There is a need to develop different augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools to help people with AOS express themselves clearly to others. Most mobile apps dedicated to helping people with various disabilities don’t support the Arabic language, which makes them less effective for users in Arab countries. We present in this paper My Voice as an Android smartphone app that acts as an AAC tool for AOS children all around the world. In fact, this app has come to fill an obvious gap in this area of research. It supports both Arabic and English languages, allowing the users in Arabia to benefit from its features in a similar way to other users in other parts of the world. Moreover, the proposed app provides a user-friendly dashboard that can be used to convert written sentences into speech. It has three modes of communication, which are “keyboard,” “phrases,” and “words.” These modes give the user the choice to select the most intuitive method for constructing sentences. To evaluate our work, we have tested My Voice by asking a group of potential users to use it for a month and then fill out a 10-question survey. The feedback from the survey was very encouraging. As a future work, we plan to add new languages, present an iOS version, and include artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.