Avaz For Autism

From Invention Labs:

Avaz for Autism is a full-featured, research-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app for autism. Avaz runs on Android-based tablets and phones*. Avaz uses picture symbols and high-quality voice synthesis to help users create messages and develop language skills. Avaz also incorporates a powerful keyboard to help users transitioning to text. Recommended by speech and language therapists working with children with autism worldwide."Wonderful wonderful wonderful. This product is amazing. It is simple, user friendly - both for adults to customize and for children to use. Importantly, the way the messages are organized follows logical order of oral communication. This smart organization allows adults to model messages on Avaz along with oral communication for the child with least effort. The exhaustive vocabulary library on Avaz is designed for users to communicate any message. The icon highlighting feature is a added bonus for kids with slow processing and visual challenges." - Ram Gangisetty, Speech and Language Pathologist at the Santa Clara Country Office of Education.Avaz was developed in collaboration with 25 schools and 500 children, with one purpose in mind: how to help children with autism achieve the most effective interactive communication possible. The app comes with 3 research-based, graded, picture vocabularies that will help a child with autism begin to communicate. Each of these vocabularies has been designed to facilitate spontaneous novel utterance generation, encouraging a child to not only use language, but also generalize from it. The vocabularies mimic the way verbal children learn natural language, except that instead of verbal words, Avaz uses pictures. This is the approach that therapists and educators increasingly follow nowadays, to bring out the maximum potential of a child with autism. Avaz isn't only child friendly - it's also care-giver friendly. It's simple and quick to add new vocabulary to Avaz. You can rearrange, modify and edit all the content in Avaz in moments. In addition to 10,000+ high-quality Symbolstix symbols, you can also take or import your own photographs from your tablet/phone into Avaz. Avaz takes the hassle out of 'programming' a typical AAC aid, and keeps the focus on interacting with the child. Avaz is also 'therapy-agnostic' - therapists have reported great feedback with Avaz when used with AAC systems like PECS and PODD.Avaz comes with 5 high-quality voices from Acapela, with two accents, male, female and child voices. While Avaz helps a child get started quickly with pictures, it's also great for facilitating easy transition into text. Avaz's keyboard has support for saving and loading text, a Quick response bar for frequently-used messages, and a picture-assisted text prediction capability for sight readers to use text. Avaz is possibly the only AAC app that was specifically designed with ONE group in mind: children with autism. Using the settings in Avaz, you can tailor it for a specific individual. Avaz features animation for maximizing reinforcement, the ability to remove distracting content from the screen, fine-grained control over the speech output, and a high-contrast mode. You can adjust the size of the images on Avaz, and even tweak the ratio between the picture size and its caption size for sight readers. We believe Avaz is the most effective, easiest-to-use app on the app store, for both children with autism as well as their therapists, parents and care-givers. * Avaz runs on Android devices (tablets and phones) requiring a minimum internal memory of 100MB and external sdcard memory of 800MB. Avaz has been tested on tablets like Google Nexus, Amazon Kindle Fire, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Archos, Milagrow, Micromax and phones like Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S plus and Sony Ericson Wt19i. Note that Avaz runs only in landscape mode.Content rating: Everyone

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