The developer of OneVoice wants you to know something – “OneVoice does less than most augmented communication devices. Why? Because making it easy to use is far more important than making sure it has every possible feature.” That’s a refreshing mantra, and well needed for a certain population of autistic children. It DOES need to be easy to use.

This augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app is ready to go right out of the box… um, the proverbial box, since no apps actually come out of a real, physical box. Of course, you’ll want to personalize it in order to get the most out of it though.

OneVoice is simple, easy to understand, and easy to begin using right away. It’s straight forward. Categories are listed down the left in landscape view, which seems to be the preferred view. This iPad app has two modes; A more advanced mode that allows you to build a full sentence before having the app speak it and one for beginners that speaks the word as soon as it’s touched. You can also invoke Apple’s built-in keyboard to type what you want, so your child isn’t restricted to only the symbols he sees. That’s called text-to-speech. Touch a category name to open it up center screen and expose all the icons/images within.

The default images are gorgeous. But, naturally, you can customize OneVoice with your own pictures if you prefer. The voices are the Acapella voices, just like Proloquo2Go, so they’re very natural sounding. You can choose between four different voices and also adjust the speed of the voices. It’s beautiful simplicity. The settings for OneVoice are nicely hidden behind a simple code.

OneVoice boasts a pronunciation engine, and that’s a very important component in an AAC app that exclusively uses artificial voices. However, the pronunciation engine doesn’t quite work as it should. I’ve shared this information with Legend, the developer, so you can bet that before long it will be functioning correctly.

Also, some words have the same icons/images assigned to them. This will likely be an issue for visual learners. “I” and “me” are decidedly male images, while “you” is decidedly female. However, you can change these things yourself, so I can’t really knock OneVoice for this.

I can see this iPad app being especially useful to the autism community. So if you want an AAC app that’s beautiful, and practical, but with an easy learning curve, you may want to snatch it up.