New App for Language Disorders Is First Special Education Tool to Be Featured First by Apple in Best New Apps

PORTLAND, OR, March 4, 2016 (Newswire.com) - ​Avaz, Inc., based out of Chennai, India has partnered with LanguageCraft, a Portland, OR based clinic to create a new tool for children with language disorders.  On 3/2/2016 Apple featured this app as #1 in “Best New Apps." It is the first special education application to be recognized in that position.

Called FreeSpeech, this technology is an iOS app that takes a novel approach to language learning by allowing children to see the deep structures of grammar in a fun, interactive way. No matter how they interact with the app, they will always create sentences that are grammatically correct, even if writing from Spanish to English. Originally intended as an augmentative communication app for children without oral language, it is now being used by educators serving a wide range of students, from those who are deaf or hard or hearing to those who are simply learning English as a second language. CEO Ajit Narayanan delivered a TED talk about the concept for this idea in 2013 that has been viewed over 1.1 million times.

"At first we thought this was going to be an augmentative communication application for children without oral language, but it's turning out to be useful for almost any student who needs a little help."

Lucas Steuber, Director of Clinical R&D, Avaz Inc.

Ajit and team cracked a problem that linguists and speech pathologists have been working on for ages: How to give access to language – real, compositional language – to children who did not develop the ability to speak. His efforts earned him the highest award for the development of technology presented to him personally by the President of India.

The new project – FreeSpeech – was developed in collaboration with LanguageCraft and its CEO Lucas Steuber, a Speech-Language Pathologist in Portland, OR.

For more information contact [email protected].