More New Features, New Lower Price!

We haven’t posted recently. The reason is that we’ve been busy getting a new release of Video Voice out the door, and we’re pleased to report that Version 3.0.126 is now available for download at www.videovoice.com/vv_curel.htm.

This new version of the software has some great new features and capabilities, as well as numerous improvements to existing ones. And, Video Voice is now available at an even lower price!  Here are some of the noteworthy changes and additions.

Formant Spectral Display

Live F1/F2/F3 Spectral Display

The Formant Multi-Frequency Spectral display provides live feedback on the F1, F2 and F3 frequencies in speech. Previously released in preliminary form, it has now been completely revamped. In addition to smoother display of data, you can now capture "traces" to use as models for sound practice.

The immediate feedback in this display can be very helpful for work on ‘R’ vs ‘OO’ and discrimination of high frequency sounds like ‘S’ and ‘SH’. Give this one a try! (Formant Menu - F3/F2/F1 Multi-Frequency-Spectral) We’ll be back to talk more about using the Spectral display in an upcoming  post, but for now we just wanted to let you know there have been some big changes in that display.

Customized Audio
Version 3.0.126 lets you personalize operation with your own audio recordings of voice prompts, congratulatory messages, and other vocal feedback. Your voice can be the one in prompts for voice production ("Say [target]") and reward messages, and they can be in whatever language you use or prefer. Explore this new capability through the Configuration Menu-Auditory-Feedback options.

New Voice Prompt
Video Voice now indicates readiness for voice input in many games and displays with the prompt "Speak now."  This audio help the speaker know when Video Voice starts "listening," and it's time to turn his voice on.  "Speak now" is one of the prompts that you can customize to your voice.

Localization and Keyboard Language Support
Video Voice has always been "language-independent," even though the user interface is in English. The displays and audio recording don’t know what language is being spoken, just that sound is present. Sound is sound, and all languages of have frequencies that can be visually interpreted. (Okay, maybe not "San," the clicking language used by some African tribes, but they’re not likely to be much interested in using computers for speech practice...)  But speech work with Video Voice in other than English is certainly possible, and in fact the games and displays are being successfully used for speech development and remediation in many countries around the globe.

To support non-English use further, a few months back we introduced the International/Simplified operating mode. This streamlined mode will accept and display characters in all keyboard languages. (Authorized User and Free Trial support Latin-based keyboards only.) Want to show model names in prompts in Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew? No problem! However your keyboard is defined in Windows, Video Voice’s International/Simplified mode will handle it. This gives you the ability to display on-screen text such as user and model names, in the orthographics of your language. In this operating mode, however, data cannot be stored for reuse.

The International/Simplified mode also offers translations of buttons and controls on the therapy and game screens for Spanish and French languages.

The Authorized User and Free Trial modes do support non-English, Latin-based keyboards such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, etc. This means your model and user names can contain special, accented characters used in those languages.

Fluency Guide
For those people who work with fluency cases, there’s a new "Solutions" pdf document that offers suggestions on how to use the games and displays to reduce stuttering. (Find it on the Main Menu-Solutions-Fluency pdf)

Big Bad Bug Fix
Some users had reported a lock-up bug in some articulation games, particularly those that do model-matching. It was ugly, causing Video Voice to become unresponsive and require a restart. We’d seen the problem too, but just couldn’t reproduce it reliably. If you can’t make a failure happen in identifiable ways, it’s darned hard to fix. Kind of like when you take your car to the shop and report a strange noise, but of course it doesn’t make that noise so the mechanic can hear it! Anyway, we knew the problem was real, and battled it for several months, but believe we finally have it fixed. (I’m sure you’ll let us know if we haven’t, though!) We’ve made a number of other improvements in the articulation games, too.

New Lower Price!
In these hard economic times, things are tough all over, so we’re doing our part to make Video Voice even more affordable. We’ve reduced the price on all package configurations. To learn more, go to the Pricing page on our web site: www.videovoice.com/vv_price.htm

Why Download the Current Version?
If you’re already a Video Voice user, but haven’t downloaded a new copy of the software in a while, it’s really time to do that now, since there are many additions and major improvements! There’s no charge for software updates, so what are you waiting for?

If you’ve looked at Video Voice in the past, but didn’t make the decision to add this powerful tool to your speech therapy arsenal, it’s time to take another look! With the new games, displays and features to help you streamline your therapy results, it’s a shame not to give it another try. You may be able to start another Free Trial automatically, but if you need assistance with that, we’ll be happy to offer it.

We’ll be back soon with more details on some of these new features and some interesting stories, but for now, please check out this new version of Video Voice. Think you’ll like what you see!

Yours in good speech,

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com
www.videovoice.com

Help!!

What do you do when you need help communicating information about speech with those in your caseload and getting them to understand how to make changes in their voices? The little boy who just can't seem to find the right tongue position for his 'R's. The girl whose slushy 'S' is driving you crazy. The youngster who just won't do purposeful voicing.

There are, of course, a plethora of speech therapy techniques and a number of tools available to streamline the process. One of those tools is the visual feedback on voice production Video Voice provides. We obviously believe its displays and games offer great benefits for communicating about most any aspect of speech development and remediation, and so do the many speech-language pathologists who have added it to their tool kits.

But what do you do when you need help with Video Voice? Used to be, you’d pull out the big user manual and pore through the index for answers. The problem with printed documentation, however, is that it can all too quickly become out of date, especially if the software changes. Since we’re always working on adding to and improving Video Voice, changes are a common and frequent occurrence. We therefore decided not to provide a printed manual, but instead make it an internal, integral part of the software operation. As the program changes, so does its reference material.

On virtually every Video Voice screen, you’ll find a Help button. Clicking it opens the built-in manual to the page appropriate to the area you're using. This internal documentation is not the anemic, sketchy variety many software programs have, the kind that can raise more questions than they answer. Video Voice's Help file contains more than 150 "pages" of information, chock-full of details on what the controls do for you, and how they function. The pages have an on-line "feel" to them, and are loaded with links that easily transport you to other related parts of the manual.

There are other built-in tools, too, like the Help Me Choose interactive guide and the Solutions and Support materials, all of which have buttons/links on the Main Menu. The "tool tips" for controls that appear when you dwell your cursor over them also briefly describe function to let you know if a control is what you need to use.

But sometimes you just really need to talk to somebody! We're proud to offer friendly, responsive support to both existing Video Voice users and those who are evaluating to see how it can meet their needs. You can ask your questions or get suggestions for appropriate use with different speech problems either by phone or email. Most of the time when you call, you'll hear a real person's voice on the other end of the line. If you do happen to get a recorded voice, just leave your name and number, and we'll call you back as soon as we can.

Just the other day a speech-language pathologist who's considering Video Voice called for guidance on what things would be most helpful with children she works with. Her caseload runs the gamut of the autism spectrum, from low-functioning, preschool-aged children who need vocal awareness encouragement to older, fluent ones who need to work on expressive function, particularly increasing pitch range and intonation skills. I was able to make a variety of suggestions for both cases. For the little ones who need to develop understanding that something happens when they use their voices, games like Chat-N-U-Go Choo-Choo and Pitch Painting can communicate that cause and effect. For the older boy who speaks in a monotone, P-A-R Pitch displays can illustrate desired voicing, pitch and fluent intonation in a sentence like "How ARE you?" vs. how it looks and sounds differently when he uses a flat pitch with distinct pauses between words. There are lots of other options, too, but we only talked about those few in our brief conversation.

We all need a little help sometimes, and that includes us. We do our very best to make Video Voice a flexible, easy-to-use tool, but hearing from speech-language pathologists (or others) about how they're using the displays helps us understand what we can do to make it even more effective. Of course we like to hear about things you like, but just as important are the things you don't like. If you have problems, they’re our problems, too, but we can’t fix them if we don’t know they exist. We welcome all feedback, so please give us yours!

In closing, here’s a little musical entertainment that fits the bill, and might just put a smile on your face: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=606ZcMKXlUg. 

And remember, when you need someone, we're here to help!

Video Voice Support Team
mv@videovoice.com
1-800-537-2182
www.videovoice.com

Models for Speech

People sometimes wonder why Video Voice has no preprogrammed models of target sounds and words. There are actually very good reasons for that.

To start with, we don't know what targets any individual needs to work on. Consider the number of words that exist. In the English language alone, there are at least a quarter of a million words, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And that's just English. Video Voice's displays are language-independent, and can easily be used for speech therapy in Spanish, French, Arabic or most any other language.

Even if we were to put together libraries of target models, there are other issues. There are usually distinct differences in male vs. female, adult vs. child voices. It's difficult-to-impossible to strip out the pitch elements from sounds, so a man may not be able to match a woman's model, nor a child an adult's voice.

Then there's the matter of dialectical differences. What constitutes the “correct” production of any sound? In the northeast part of the U.S. a word like “bet” is pronounced with a short vowel (“beht”). In the south, the vowel is often elongated to a diphthong, e.g., “bay-uht.” Which way is the right way? Well, that really depends on where you're living, doesn't it? To Video Voice, however, those two pronunciations won't "look" the same.

In the F2/F1 Formant Matrix representation, you can see the addition of the extra vowel sound in the red pattern ("Bay-uht"). The "ay" appears higher and more toward the left of the screen space. The durational differences in the sounds aren't strongly noticeable in this display, although the changes in the vowel sounds are.

If you switch to the F2/F1 Temporal representation for a cross-time view of the productions, the longer duration of "Bay-uht" is obvious. In both cases, you can see why the two words don't look the same to Video Voice, and why pre-programming models for use could end up being frustrating for users.

Model Libraries 

Although there are no built-in models, Video Voice does provide a structure in which you can assemble your own sets of target models for your caseload, creating your very own model library. Once you’ve defined and stored them, they’re available for repeated use, or for transfer to other folders.

Within the Authorized User operating mode, each therapist can have up to 255 folders. Each folder can contain up to 255 models. That's a total of 65,025 separate models, more than you’re ever likely to need. (I sure hope you don't have 255 individuals in your caseload!) Video Voice will allow as many as 255 separate therapist folders, which means you could have as many as 16,581,375 models stored, but I think we can agree that's just plain silly.

So let's be serious. This caseload structure means you can easily build libraries of models, which may be useful if you’re a school-based therapist, especially if a number of your students have similar speech problems, such as articulation of /r/. By building a library of models featuring that sound in different positions, you’ll have a source for targets that you can use to set up directories individualized for each student. And then you’ve got a therapy tool customized to your particular needs.

How do you go about this? Start by setting up a Therapist folder to contain the library, giving it a name such as MODLIB. Then, within that folder, define a caseload folder with a name like R Sounds. Activate the R Sounds folder with New Session, then use Formant Create to make a series of models with R: run, race, round, etc. (Make sure you clearly enunciate/stress the R during production so that it will be clearly visible in the patterns.)

You can repeat the process for S Sounds, Vowel Sounds, or whatever other targets you commonly work with, until you have a series of MODLIB folders containing your models.

Once you have built your library, you can transfer copies of any target models to any student's folder. Start by activating the desired student's folder with New Session. Then, go to the Data Management Copy Data function. Specify your MODLIB folder as the target source, and select and move desired models into the student's destination folder. Easy!

If you have students who share common therapy goals or articulation problems, you can also use this same strategy with their own data folders, treating them as a source for targets. Model libraries can streamline setup time, especially if you have a large caseload.

A final note. During therapy, consider library models to be only starting points. It’s always easiest to match your own voice, so when a student successfully produces a target, it’s a good idea to turn his voice pattern into the model. All it takes is a single click of the Replace (or SaveAs) button.

Model libraries are a good way to maximize your productivity with Video Voice and customize activities for everyone in your caseload. Why not give it a try?

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com
http://www.videovoice.com/

Hey, I Have A Voice!

Over the years, we’ve talked with many therapists who have told us they find Video Voice most helpful with young children who come into their programs with little or no awareness of their voices. In particular, profoundly deaf youngsters often start off with no idea that vocalization is even an option. Visual stimulus for those little ones can be a key that unlocks a hidden door, helping them understand that "I have a voice, and something happens when I use it!" 

Video Voice has many options to assist with this first building block of speech. The simplest are those like Pitch Painting, Magic Box (Magic Blocks option), Kaleidoscope and On The Air, in which any sound results in colorful response from the display.

Others like Chat-N-U-Go Choo-Choo and Voice-A-Sketch can be set so that any form of sound onset or ongoing vocalization will result in a change in the display. With Choo-Choo, it can be the train, car or horse moving after a vocal onset or sustained phonation is detected. With Voice-A-Sketch, a picture will be gradually be revealed. You can use these games to start with simple phonation or onsets (then later move to work on volume control, specific sounds and words).

The Up, Up and Away game, the object it to try a balloon across a mountain range. The balloon only moves when voicing is present, and its height is related to the volume level. If the player This encourages vocalization, and allows for work on speaking volume as well.

With the Jumping Jack race game, you can use the More Volume option, but set the volume level required very low. Then, most any vocalization will make Jack run.

Another simple "cause and effect" game option is Laser Master.  In this game, vocalization activates a laser beam and moves an "alien space ship" out into space (off the screen).  Although the general purpose of this game is for pitch and/or volume work, the Duration goal simplifies operation, and any pitch or volume will make the space ship glide across the screen. 

In addition to the games, Video Voice offers other graphic displays to help develop cognition of speech, such as the Formant Multi-Frequency Spectral display and Formant Gobble.  The Spectral display provides visual feedback with a colorful graph of all three Formant frequencies simultaneously.  The Gobble display is like "Pac-Man for speech" - the goal is to eat up a sound pattern.  The live nature of these displays is a very powerful way to illustrate the presence (or absence) of speech.

These are just some of the ways visual feedback can stimulate the awareness and use of voice. Whether you’re working with hearing impaired children, those with autism who need encouragement to develop their speech skills, or youngsters those who are relearning vocal control after a head injury, you’re sure to find something in Video Voice that will pique their interest and get them talking!

Yours in good speech,

Video Voice Support Team

1-800-537-2182

mv@videovoice.com

Picture Perfect Speech

There are many aspects of Video Voice that can be adapted to meet the individual needs of the people you work with. You can specify the kinds of reward images and sounds that you want to see and hear. You can choose how scores appear in the Formant and P-A-R displays, as well as some aspects of their calculation. In the games, you can control which reward sounds are played at the end of the game, default Fade Speed, Pitch Range and other aspects of score display and game operation.  Changes you make can be stored as part of your Therapist ID settings , or, if you have a individual’s data folder active, settings can be permanently saved there.  Then, any time you reactivate that person’s data folder, the individualized settings  are automatically used.

The game that has the most options for customization is Voice-A-Sketch.  In that game, meeting the defined speech goal results in a picture appearing, either in pieces or in "window shade" fashion.  (The goals can be continuous phonation, volume above or below a defined target level, production of a target sound or work, and more.)  There are 78 high-quality built-in pictures to choose from, but you can also use images you have stored on your computer.

A few years ago, a therapist who works with autistic children said she felt they would respond more favorably if familiar images appeared - family members, pets or other objects of particular interest to them.  We responded by adding a new Graphics Source control that lets you use either the Built-In or My Own Pictures.  If you choose the latter, Video Voice looks in the My Documents/My Pictures area of your computer, and lets you choose from any images you have stored there.

This provides some very powerful personalization of the game. Say you’ve got a little girl who is very motivated by horses, or a little boy who loves sports cars. You can set up folders under their names in your My Pictures area and fill them with those kinds of images.

There are literally thousands of pictures available online of nearly any image type. Google or other search engines can assist you in locating them. When you find one you want to use, simply right-click on it and use the "Save Image As" option to put a copy of the .jpg or .gif in the desired My Pictures folder.  Voila!  You’ve now got a picture you can use in Voice-A-Sketch.

When importing pictures into Voice-A-Sketch, you don’t have to worry about the shape and size. Video Voice will size the pictures to best fit within the available space and adapt the picture frame accordingly.  The best images will be landscape in orientation, because that’s how the screen’s "easel space" is laid out, but any size or shape will work.

The possibilities are endless!  Have fun personalizing Voice-A-Sketch to make it even more uniquely motivating for individual cases.  If it’s an option for you, you even can involve them in the search for pictures they’d like to see, and use that as a therapy activity, too.

Yours in good speech,

Video Voice Support Team
http://www.videovoice.com/
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Where's That Vowel?

One of the things Video Voice is helpful with is training production and differentiation of vowel sounds. In fact, in its original, prototype form, with only an F2/F1 display, that’s all it really could do!  The people who developed it were particularly interested in vowel production work, and based the display on Grant Fairbanks’ 1959 Voice and Articulation Drill Book (see History of Video Voice http://videovoicetalk.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html). 

In the F2/F1 display, vowels map into regions of the screen that generally correspond to place of production in the mouth, where the left side of the screen is the front of the mouth, and the right side, the back. The sample screen below illustrates this with a high front vowel (/i/) and a low back vowel (/a/) map in this display.

Minor changes in articulator position can affect the sounds that are produced, but the ear is ingeniously capable of differentiating, or in some cases, "glossing over" them. The difference between the long and short "E" sounds ("beet" and "bit") is a slight relaxation of the tongue away from the hard palate. These subtle differences can be difficult for speakers of other languages to hear and master, although they make a very real difference to native speakers. The difference in meaning is significant, for example, with something like "sheet metal."

"ih" (as in "bit) and "eh" ("bet") are also similar sounds, although the latter is produced slightly lower and farther back in the mouth. Again, other languages may not have the same set of vowel sounds, so learning to produce and differentiate these sounds can be a challenge. The F2/F1 display can help make these subtle differences more obvious.

The "squiggly" lines that represent these sounds in the F2/F1 display are formed from the speech data  that comprises them. Some of the dots result from the initial onset of sound and trailing off to silence at the end, and those dots are less meaningful than the ones related to the actual sound, which typically appear in clusters in a general area of the screen.

If those you’re working with young children or others who find the standard F2/F1 display difficult to interpret, you can use an alternate way to illustrate sounds - the Spheres Style. This is particularly useful for single-sound targets. Activate this in the F2/F1 display after producing targets by clicking the Style control, and the patterns change from squiggly lines to blue and red spheres which illustrate the greatest density of dots in the pattern. You can then have the speaker try to match the location of vowels that way. (If you want the Style option to be the default display, use the Adjust button to change that control.)

We added this control after talking with a speech professor who was interested in exploring differences between vowel locations with groups of individuals - men vs. women, children vs. adults, native vs. non-native speakers. Pitch differences between speakers do affect the formant frequencies of sounds, and this is another way to show that fact. If you’re interested in more technical aspects of the sounds, you can dwell with your cursor over the spheres to see the F2 and F1 frequency values. (This works with the regular "squiggly" patterns as well.)

Video Voice has lots of options for changing how the displays operate to make them the most useful for people you’re working with. Any adjustable control is highlighted in cyan color, and the cursor also changes to a "hand" graphic to let you know something can be changed, and you’ll also see a "tool tip" that provides a brief description of its function. So have fun, experiment and explore all it can do!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Learning Video Voice - Help Me Choose

Learning to use a new piece of software can be fun, but can also be a challenge. Everything is new and unfamiliar, and you may not be sure where to start. There are lots of choices, and you're not sure what they do. How do you proceed? Click and guess? That's what a lot of us do, and it can be all too easy to get into "deep water," unsure of how you got there and how to get out!

Video Voice is a robust therapy tool with a variety of games and displays, each with many adjustable options that let you tailor operation to your specific needs. We’ve tried to do our very best to make it easy to learn and use. But, because there’s so much you can do with it, figuring out where to start can be daunting.

Welcome to Help Me Choose! In the lower area of the Main and Start-Up menus, you’ll find a Help Me Choose button. This opens an interactive application that lets you pick and choose among many common goals therapists share, things like articulation, vocal awareness, pitch, volume, and breath control and get information about them and access to them.

Start by clicking one of the speech goals. The first one, Vocal Awareness, has been preselected for you, and on the right side of the window you’ll see the different options Video Voice offers for work on that aspect of speech. Click on any of the options, and a brief summary of that game or display appears in the lower area of the window. Want to give it a try? Just click Use, and Video Voice will take you to that area so you can explore it. When you’re done, click Back, and you’ll see the Help Me Choose interactive guide again, where you can select other games or displays to try out.

 Pretty cool, isn’t it? Help Me Choose is just one of the ways Video Voice helps you learn about how it operates. Others include:

• Context-Sensitive Help. You can click Help at most any point in Video Voice operation, and open the extensive internal manual to the page appropriate for the area where you’re working.
• Tool Tips:  Dwell with your cursor over any button or adjustable control (cyan-colored text identifies adjustability), and a little pop-up box will appear that briefly describes its function.
• Start-Up Tips:  This button on the Main Menu provides suggestions on how to get started with Video Voice, as well as access to lots of other information, such as FAQs, Uses and more.
• Solutions and Support PDFs:  Solutions are 1-2 page documents that offer guidance on using Video Voice for common speech goals, things like Vocal Awareness, Articulation, Pitch and Volume.  You can print them to keep handy for reference.  Other support PDFs provide information about Getting Started, and Overview of operation, a handy Displays and Activities reference chart, and more. 

And, if you get stuck, we’re available by phone or email to make suggestions on use for different therapy activities and help you get going. We want your experience with Video Voice to be positive, so don’t hesitate to call on us for assistance!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Say YESSSSSS!

Therapists who work with hearing-impaired speakers have often told us that teaching them how to produce /s/ and related high-frequency sounds is a big challenge, as the frequency ranges in which these sounds exist is generally outside the range in which deaf folks can hear.  While it is possible to illustrate production of these sounds somewhat with the lips and air flow from the mouth, it’s really little changes in tongue position behind the teeth that make the most difference, and these can't be easily shown.  Having a concrete way to illustrate the differences between these two sounds can make a real difference in results.  The same is true with children who lisp or lateralize the /s/ sound. 

With Video Voice’s Formant Multi-Frequency displays, there are a couple of ways to make the differences between /s/ and /sh/ visible. One is the Temporal Display, which represents the F3, F2 and F1 components of a production. In that display, if you say a word that contains both /s/ and /sh/ sounds, such as "sunshine," you will see distinct differences in the F3 and F2 frequencies for the two sounds. With the /s/ sound, the F3 frequencies are higher than those for the /sh/, while the F2 levels higher for /sh/ than they are for /s/.

Any speech production can be saved as a model, and used for repeated practice of sound or words.

There’s also a Matrix-Match form of the Multi-Frequency Display. It transforms the F3 and F2 frequencies measured into a relationship of those sound components. This makes sounds like /s/ and /sh/ appear as dense patches of color in different regions of the screen, as shown the sample below.

You can use these matrix patterns in a model match mode, or in a live feedback format similar to the F2/F1 Gobble game. The immediate visual response to sound changes in the Gobble mode helps speakers learn articulator position needed to produce these sounds accurately.

There is presently no scoring in the Formant Multi-Frequency displays, but we’re working on that, and expect it to be available in an upcoming release. Stay tuned!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

R-D-R-R-R: Gobbling Up Sounds

Almost every therapist who works with children has at least one with this problem - the pesky R sound. This semi-vowel is one of the most difficult to train, because, unlike many other sounds, it can’t easily be illustrated in the mouth. Minor changes in tongue position and "bunching" are the difference between a nice, clear ‘r’ and a sloppy ‘w’ sound, and lots of kids struggle with that.

Video Voice has a number of ways to help them learn how to produce this sound correctly, but for today, we’ll just talk about one of them, the F2/F1 Gobble display. In this Pac-Man-style game, the speaker uses his voice to erase the dots on the screen. The live feedback is very powerful. It lets him "play" with his voice and get instantaneous response while he explores different articulator positions. Being able to find and maintain correct articular position helps ingrain the kinesthetics of production of this sound.

Here’s a simple way to get going. Use the Formant Menu’s Free Form F2/F1 Match mode and produce a sample of the R target in isolation. We always recommend that you do several trials of a sound, looking for consistency in density and location of the dots before defining one as the model. Once you’ve decided to Use one, click the Match Mode control to switch to the Gobble format. Video Voice will prompt "Say ‘rrrr’" using your voice target, and you can have the child try to Gobble it up. If it’s too easy to succeed, just raise the Goal (percent erasure required to win above the default 80%).

Want to get rid of all the other vowels, leaving only the R symbol ? Just double-click on that symbol, and all the others will magically disappear. 

But what if you’d like to get rid of everything except the R and U, so the child can see the similar location of the two sounds on the screen (and in the mouth!). That’s easy, too. Click on one of the vowels, and when the small instructional box appears, click and drag any unwanted symbols off the edge of the screen. Then click Apply to temporarily save that more limited vowel chart for use in the current session. (Using Save will erase the other symbols until you reactivate them all with the Adjust button, so you may not want to take that more permanent action.)

Then, play, play, play! You’ll be amazed at how long the children will stay on task, how entertained and motivated they’ll be as they gobble up the sound dots.

By the way, if you have used New Session to activate a data folder, you can Save any Free Form target for reuse in subsequent sessions, so you won’t have to go through the definition process each time. Just use the Stored Models option from the Formant Menu to retrieve them later on.

This example presents work on the R in isolation, but you can just as easily set up word targets to let the child practice vocabulary words containing the R sound using these same steps.

That’s it for today! We’ll be back later to tell you more ways to use Video Voice for work on R and other sounds.

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

The History of Video Voice

Video Voice has a more than 25 year history. It got its start back in 1984, when a team of scientists, one of whom was hearing-impaired, began looking for a way to illustrate speech. The chemistry professor, who had been deaf since birth, decided as a child that he wanted to be a scientist, and understood that he’d need to be able to speak to be successful in that career. So he regularly attended speech therapy and diligently practiced at home between sessions, but was often frustrated to find he’d been practicing the wrong sound. So he and colleagues - an electronic engineer and a software designer - set about creating an electronic device that would illustrate sounds as they were produced. Their design was based on the vowel representation scheme from Grant Fairbanks’ Voice and Articulation Drill Book (©1954), and they  were granted a patent for both the hardware and software.

The first version of Video Voice was based on a small microcomputer called the Interact. Most people haven’t heard of it, but it was one of the first personal computers on the market. It was released about the time of the Radio Shack TRS80. The graphics capabilities were modest, with only a 112x77 pixel resolution (!!) and a total of 8 colors, but it had a built-in analog-to-digital converter, an important capability since speech is analog by nature. The earliest Video Voice models included that computer and an external device called the Speech Analyzer (or "black box") that converted the voice data to digital form as it was sampled.

The inventors’ prototype provided feedback that was pretty meager, nothing more than a few dots on the screen that showed the basic location of a vowel sound. That didn’t seem like it would be interesting for long, so we set about fleshing out the display and software to turn it into a tool that would be motivating - adding color, a model and trial structure, on-screen vowel display, and much more.

As computers gained popularity in schools, therapists started asking for a version that would operate on Apple II/IIgs computers, so we converted the software to operate on those platforms. Then came the Macintosh, and we produced a Mac-based Video Voice. And then one for the IBM PC, first a DOS-based version, then a Windows-compatible one. (During this time, IBM produced its Speech Viewer program, which became widely known, but is no longer available.)

The external Speech Analyzer was retired with the release of Version 3.0. All voice sampling is done through the computer’s internal sound capabilities, and the analysis with our own specialized software routines. This allowed us to greatly expand Video Voice’s capabilities to increase the frequency ranges of sound sampling and add many new games and displays, at a signficantly lower price,.

Expanded capabilities include much wider pitch range to accommodate low-pitched male voices and high-pitched children’s voices (something the Speech Analyzer versions were limited in). We’ve also been able to increase the formant frequency sampling to illustrate and differentiate high frequency sounds like /s/ and /sh/. (The earlier, hardware-dependent versions could detect the presence or absence of high-frequency sounds, but could not tell the difference between them.)

With faster computers with greater capabilities, we’ve been able to greatly enhance the graphics used in Video Voice. They’re still not as fancy or with Xbox-type resolution, because there’s a lot going on "behind the scenes" in the voice sampling and analysis that takes substantial "compute time." And, after all, the point is to illustrate speech, not to be a realistic action game.

To wit, many years back, some folks designed a software interface that integrated with some video games that were then available which had higher resolution graphics and action. It could be programmed to accept 4 words that would control the action of a game (for purposes of this example - "left," "right," "up," and "down"). The goal was to command virtual game player to move around and avoid being attacked by a monster (again, an example). Unfortunately, what hadn’t been considered was the excitement factor in the sound analysis. Targets that were calmly produced when the game was being initially set up, didn’t achieve the desired motion response when the player got excited during the game action and began shouting the words at the screen. Pitch and volume, after all, do affect sound production! This program quickly faded from the scene.

Version 3.0 is the only Video Voice model now being produced. It operates on most Windows operating systems (Windows 2000 and later), and is not dependent on processor speed. In fact, on really fast computers, we actually have to slow some things down. A two-second model, for example, needs to be two-seconds long, even if the computer is capable of displaying the graphics much faster.

That’s the basic history of Video Voice. Development is ongoing, with new things added all the time, so there will still be future chapters written!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Technical Yada-Yada

From time to time, people ask about the technical details of Video Voice. So I asked the programming staff to provide some, and here’s what they had to say.

The heart of the Video Voice software is a specially developed Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) routine packaged in a .dll. It "pumps" the speech data to the various therapy displays and games. The FFT analyzes data obtained from the computer’s sound card and extracts F1, F2, F3, Pitch and Volume data as well as the strength of each frequency in the range of (70-7000 Hz), while simultaneously allowing graphic display and analysis in real-time. The FFT was developed for Version 3.0 and replaces a patented filtering process that required external Speech Analyzer hardware in previous versions of the software. The .dll also contains a set of precision timers that permits timed operations on computers with different internal processor speeds. The ability to use the computer’s sound facilities to record and play back sound files is another capability.

The Video Voice program consists of 270,000+ lines of VB6 programming code organized in more than 5,700 procedures. If printed as a book (called a listing in the old days), it would be over 7,200 pages long. Needless to say, we never print listings any more! In addition to the program code, there are nearly 1,000 built-in picture and sound (.wav) files, and an extensive Help subsystem with more than 150 topics that document program operation and use.

Have your eyes glazed over yet?

So, what does all this mean to Video Voice users? Well, there are 31 different colorful, motivating games and displays with more than 70 different modes of operation that can easily be customized to your personal needs. Most have entertaining graphic animations to reward successful performance. Individuals’ vocal productions are recorded and can be saved as models for repeated use. For most games and displays, performance can be reviewed in a variety of single session and cross-time reports and graphs. Whether your computer is an old workhorse with Windows 2000 or a fancy new one driven by Windows 7, Video Voice will run on it.

The program is fully documented with context-sensitive Help – just click the Help button at any time, and the internal manual will open to the page appropriate for the area where you’re working. There’s also a "Help Me Choose" interactive guide that helps you select appropriate areas for most common speech goals, as well as integrated Demos that use prerecorded audio to simulate operation of the games and displays. Adjustable options and game controls have "tool tips," helpful little hints that pop up to let you know what their basic functions are when you pause your cursor over them. Also integrated are a number of printable PDF supporting materials that suggest activities for work on pitch, volume, articulation and more.

First released in 2006, Version 3.0 is still undergoing development. We continue to find new things to add and ways to enhance what it can do. But more on that later!

Good speech to you,

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

The King's Speech!

Hooray for Hollywood!! Honoring The King's Speech for best picture, best director, best actor, and best writer of a screen play is a huge boost to stutterers and to the speech therapy community. Kudos to the makers of this relatively low-budget film for raising social awareness of fluency, a communication challenge that is a struggle for an estimated 68 million people worldwide.

As most people now know, writer David Seidler was a childhood stutterer, but learned techniques to enhance his fluency skills, and became a remarkable, articulate gentleman. In a series of recent interviews, he’s shared his own story, and talked how he came to write the award-winning screenplay.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/12/17/screenwriter-david-seidler-‘being-a-stutterer-puts-a-cloud-over-childhood’/

http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/18/kings-speech-writer-has-his-own-stutter-story.html

I particularly enjoyed this video interview in which he talks about his own history and that of The King’s Speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q6t_5sKTUk

The Stuttering Foundation is joining in the celebration of this most special motion picture, congratulating "The King's Speech, which had a royal night at the Oscars."  This non-profit organization a more than 60-year history focus on improving the lives of people with this speaking difficulty for more than 60 years.  To see their extensive online assistive resources, pay a visit to http://www.stutteringhelp.org/.

The National Stuttering Association, a large self-help organization, also applauds the increased public awareness this film brings to a problem they all share.  "... 'The King’s Speech,' focuses on the struggle of King George VI of Britain to come to terms with his stuttering and inspire a nation. We’re delighted to see a film that accurately depicts the experience of people who stutter through the compelling story of a real-life hero."    http://www.nsastutter.org/

Fluency is an ongoing challenge for people afflicted with this speech disability and speech therapists who work with them, but at least we’ve come a long way since the days when it was seen as a mental illness, something to be ashamed of and hidden. Or at least I hope we have!

Congratulations to David Seidler, Tom Hooper and Colin Firth for their excellent work!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Shared Smiles

Probably the most rewarding part of about being involved with Video Voice is hearing stories about how it helps people. We get lots of positive feedback from users, and I thought I’d share a few with you.

A year or so ago, a therapist told us about using the Voice-A-Sketch game with one of her students with fluency problems. She had him try to reveal an entire hidden picture with by sustaining vocalization of a sentence, and he’d been practicing diligently. A teaching aide who was in the room with them as he successfully completed the task spun around in surprise - it was the first time she'd heard him form a complete sentence without stuttering!

A therapist who uses Video Voice with autistic students told us that it really motivates them to participate in speech therapy. In fact, sometimes it's the ONLY thing they will respond to! (Obviously, that’s not the ultimate goal, but at least it’s a start.)

Pitch awareness and control is a common problem for hearing-impaired students, and that was the case with a profoundly deaf third grader. Her voice was shrill and squeaky, so her therapist used the Pitch Painting game to help her learn to lower her pitch. That game represents, pitch as colors in a spectrum, with high pitch appearing as light colors such as yellow and white. The child’s goal was to keep her colors "under pink," and she was able to achieve that goal regularly while using the display. Carry-over is always a challenge, though, so the therapist came up with a creative idea for times when they were not at the computer. She began to sign "under pink" when her pitch was too high, and the child would respond by lowering it. They taught teachers in her other classes to use that sign, too, and all were impressed at how she responded appropriately.

Especially rewarding are the stories come from those who improved their speech skills with the visual feedback.

One of our favorite, long-time Video Voice users shared a story that had made her smile. While she was out shopping one day, a young woman approached her and said "I don't know if you remember me, but you were my speech therapist when I was in school. We used a computer program that helped me learn to say my R's correctly!" This was at least 10 years after the fact, but when she learned her name, she did recall her and their therapy goals. So pleased to be remembered and know she’d made a real difference in that young woman’s life, that she made sure to share the story with us.

Not long ago we received an email from a hearing-impaired woman who had run across the Video Voice website and thought it might be the same program she'd used in therapy about a decade earlier. She said she'd often thought about how Video Voice helped her understand what she needed to do with her voice, and wondered if it was still around. She was pleased to find that it was. Her therapist was the one who suggested the "train game" (Chat-N-U-Go Choo-Choo) to us, and offered guidance in the development of that activity. It was fun to hear that she remembered Video Voice fondly, particularly that activity, and felt she had benefitted from the feedback it provided.

These are just a few of the stories we’ve heard over the years. If you’ve had successes with people in your caseload either while using the Free Trial or full Video Voice program, we’d love to hear from you, too!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Visual Feedback Enhances Speech Therapy Results

The benefits visual feedback offers to both clincians and individuals receiving speech therapy are unquestionable.  Speech is fleeting and intangible by nature, and challenges in interpreting it can be influenced by a number of things, including hearing loss and other auditory processing deficits.  While production of some sounds can be illustrated fairly easily using our mouths, elements such as pitch and volume are essentially invisible.  Having a way to freeze, view and replay a speech production and its components therefore has great value.

Visual feedback changes the nature of the speech therapy process, giving the student or patient a different sense of control.  After all, it is his voice that's represented and recorded, and he has a new way to understand and learn to modify tongue or other articulator position to change the resulting display.  It's no longer a case of what the therapist says he's doing right or wrong, it's what both people see happening on the screen, and it gives them a different way to discuss it.  As more than one therapist has told us, "They can't argue with me anymore!"

For those who have already had years of speech therapy and are bored with the process, visual feedback brings new life to the activities.   Having different games to play and displays to practice sounds, words and connected speech turns therapy into a fun, exciting adventure to be explored and enjoyed.

Video Voice has many entertaining practice formats that keep therapy recipients motivated and eager to succeed in improving their speech skills.  Many provide live feedback on pitch, volume or sounds, so the speaker gets instant response to changes he makes, helping him find and maintain correct production.  Colorful animations and encouraging messages support the therapist by rewarding good performance. 

There are many reasons to consider visual feedback as an adjunct to speech therapy.  If you're not already exploring the benefits, you're missing out on a tool that can expedite progress with your caseload.  You can give Video Voice a try for free to see for yourself how it can enhance your therapy results.  There's no cost to download and explore what it can do for you.  Just pay a visit to http://www.videovoice.com/!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Let's Talk Video Voice!

When starting up a blog, the biggest challenge is figuring out where to start! With the Video Voice Speech Training System, there is a LOT to talk about. It has a long history, having been successfully used by speech therapists in schools, hospitals and clinics for more than 25 years. It has numerous games and displays that provide visual feedback to assist in speech therapy with almost any kind of speech problem, with young children through adults.

Over the years, Video Voice has undergone many changes, getting better with each new version, as we make additions and enhancements based on our own testing and creative thinking, as well as feedback from people using it. Feedback from therapists has historically been an important part of Video Voice development, and we take comments and suggestions seriously. If there’s something someone doesn’t like, we try to modify operation accordingly. If someone has an idea for a new game or display, we do our best to incorporate it.

One example is the Chat-N-U-Go Choo-Choo game, requested by a therapist who had some children in her caseload who were fascinated by trains. In response, we added a game in which sound production makes a train move through a mountain scene. Another therapist really wanted non-violent game graphics in the Bombs Away! game (now called Bulls Eye!), so we added an option in which a plane drops care packages to waiting hungry villagers instead of bombs on ships or tanks. (The boys still like the bombs best, though - no big surprise!) That therapist also suggested a cause-and-effect display that would result in flowers growing when a cloud rains in the right places, and the Flower Power game option was born. There are lots of other examples, but the point is that we listen to our users and do our best to make Video Voice do what they need it to do.

The goal of this blog is to provide a forum for communicating with our users, as well as people who are considering adding it to their speech therapy tool kits. We’ll tell you about the history, discuss different ways the visual feedback can be used in the therapy process, let you know about new things that we’ve added or are in progress, and answer questions you may have. We welcome your thoughts, opinions, feedback and suggestions.

If you don’t already have Video Voice, you can download the software and try it for free for 30 days to see what benefits it may offer you. Just visit www.videovoice.com and click any of the Free Trial links to get started. By the way, there’s no on going financial obligation with the trial, no credit card necessary to download and try out the games and displays - the trial simply expires at the end of the 30-day period. (You will need an external microphone, and the one we recommend is the Logitech USB Desktop model. It’s a good quality but inexpensive mic that’s commonly used in telecommunications and gaming, and it is easily available at most electronics stores or online, generally for around $30.) If you do already use Video Voice, remember that you can get no-charge updates as new versions are released to keep your software up-to-date.

That’s it for now, and we look forward to more Video Voice Talk with you!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com