Compatible with iPhone
and iPod Touch
Tiga Talk
Tiga Talk is an iPhone app designed to help kids practice and learn how to make simple phonetic sounds. It would surely help out any youngster who's starting to make sounds, but Tiga Talk is especially nice for children with autism or other developmental disabilities who are struggling with speech.
The fun cartoon animation and the characters will keep your child's interest. Kids will learn and perform tasks without realizing they are working. That's education at its best!
First, your device must have a mic in order to use Tiga Talk (pronounced Tee-gah). Without a mic you're up a creek. Naturally, iPhones are equipped. And all new iPod Touches and iPads also have built-in mics.
Tiga Talk takes your child through a sound adventure! Sounds cool, right? The colors and the animation are beautiful. The different animals will ask your child to make specific phonetic sounds. The animals will encourage and reward your child too! Make the sound and then play a little game that's related to that sound. Wow! The games are fun and animated!
I thought it was an important thing to note that Tiga Talk doesn't require your child to make the sound correctly. The app just needs to hear a sound loudly and clearly. It can be any sound, but your kid is encouraged to make the correct sound, of course. So if your runt says "bzzzzz" instead of "baaaah" they will still be rewarded. It's the attempt that counts! That's perfect.
The Skill Test prevents young children from accessing the menu screens. You can turn this off, but it's there to stop children from fiddling with things. So brush up on your multiplication. I noticed that once I answered the skill question and went into the menus, then exited the menus, I could go right back in without answering another skill question. So once you answer it, be aware that the Skill Test is basically off until you restart the app. It needs to be fixed so that every time you exit the menus you are presented with another skill test when you try to go back in.
Tiga Talk is often slow to respond. When I made sounds loudly and clearly, as told, the app exhibited a significant delay. The meter didn't register my sounds as I made them. This is a concern. So I recalibrated the mic through Tiga Talk's settings menu, but the issue still wasn't resolved.
You can touch the mouth that's on the sound meter bar at anytime, so you can hear the sound and see a real mouth as it makes the sound. That's a nice feature. But I noticed that if you do this while the cartoon animal is giving instructions, it cuts him off and you won't get to hear what he expects you to do. Kids will inevitably be waiting for instruction, and some kids like my son with autism, will get frustrated when this happens because Tiga Talk stops doing anything. The cartoon animal is waiting for a sound, but the child doesn't know that. The mouth button should probably be disabled until the cool cartoon animal finishes speaking.
Lessons are divided up into easy, medium, and hard. You can leave this setting on "all" to have Tiga Talk start with the easy sounds and build up to the more difficult ones. Using Tiga Talk's menu you can also go directly to certain lessons or to certain games. So you don't have to go through the game every time. You can choose to focus on only certain sounds.
I'm impressed with the concept behind Tiga Talk. When the developer gets the kinks worked out this will be one of the best speech apps for learning and practicing sounds!
