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. What’s worse, there aren’t enough speech therapists, especially in country regions: statistics say there's 1 doctor per 420 children. Private specialists are not available for everyone because they’re pricey.

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

Now kids can talk to Alice and train their speech at the same time thanks to a speech-training tool available for free on any smartphone.

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 based our content on the fact 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 training melodies and songs. The speech specialists checked every song and guided the singers through the recording sessions.?

4)To make «Sounds Easy» enjoyable for kids we involved the Fixies, Russia's most popular cartoon characters, and based some songs on their recognizable 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 speech training free and accessible to 80 mln Alice users.

The tool is basically a new way of speech training as it is a game-based song training integrated into a voice assistant.

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: to 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 towards correct articulation by asking him to repeat the exercise in case of deviations. 

Together with a big team of enthusiasts, Yandex created songs following 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 at no charge.?

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