Alice is the most popular voice assistant in Russia designed by Yandex. And kids love talking to her. A lot. That’s why we wanted to help them spend more quality time together. 

We found out that the most common problem kids face is the speech disorder. If untreated, this may cause dyslexia and other speech problems.

So we decided to help them and to raise awareness about access to speech therapy and its importance in general.

We knew that preschoolers feel comfortable communicating with the voice assistant Alice who lives inside our Yandex Search App. This fact inspired us to develop and to add the training skill directly into the app. 

Our global mission was to make speech training free and accessible all over Russia.

Also, to make the process easy and relevant for kids. 

So how do we help children develop their speech and make the training accessible to everyone? By adding a training tool into a voice assistant which is being used by 80% of Russians.

To actually help the kids, we made this tool in collaboration with speech therapists, children’s poets, and some of the most popular singers-songwriters. Besides, we turned the training process into a song-based game: to work on a problematic sound, kids had to sing a special song.

Our plan was to make the tool engaging, effective and accessible. 

1)We found out that kids mostly develop their sound and speech abilities at the age from 5 to 7. ?

2)We invited speech specialists who came up with rules for every song and warm-up session.?

3)Then we created the content together with famous singers-songwriters who helped us develop the training melodies and songs. The speech specialists checked every song and guided the singers through the recording sessions. ?

4)We involved the Fixies, Russia's most popular cartoon characters, and based some songs on their melodies. ?

5)This collaboration made us visible for influencers and media, and even for the Ministry of Education of Russia.?

6)The app is available on any smartphone, which makes the training free and accessible to 80 mln Alice users. 

The tool is basically the new way of speech training as it is a game-based song training integrated into a voice assistant inside our Yandex Search App. 

The first step is to choose one of the characters to practice particular sounds. It can be a Fixie, a famous cartoon character, or a Soundie, a specially created character voiced by pop-singers. The second step is a warm-up: repeat sounds after the characters. And the third step is to practice by singing a song. The characters also represent skills that kids acquire if they overcome their speech difficulties.

Technically, the AI-powered speech recognition technology guides the child toward correct articulation by asking him to repeat the exercise in case of deviations. 

Together with a big team of enthusiasts, Yandex created songs according to the complex speech therapy principles and found a way to make the training accessible.

The results:

– Sounds Easy became one of the two most popular skills in Alice's children's category.?

– The tool was also acknowledged by the Ministry of Education.?

– Sounds Easy was included into the school curriculum during the quarantine-2020. ?

– Due to the tool's social significance, experts and artists contributed to the project for free.?

– Most importantly, speech training became available for all children for free.?