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 The problem with printed documentation, however, is that it can all too quickly become out of date, especially if the software changes.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