Why it exists
Malachi is nonverbal and autistic. The apps that could give him a voice mostly cost a few hundred dollars, or asked for a subscription, or wanted an account and a copy of his data before they would say a word.
So the board started as something built for him specifically: a grid of words he actually used, on a device already in the house. Every feature in the app since then shipped because he needed it that week — not because a roadmap called for it. Recorded voices exist because the synthetic one mangled a name. Printing exists because a tablet cannot go in a pool. The sentence builder exists because single words stopped being enough.
It is free because the reason it was built does not stop being true for anybody else's family.
One person, not a company
This is worth saying plainly rather than leaving to be inferred. You may be choosing the app someone in your family will use to speak for years, and who is on the other end of it is a fair thing to want to know before you start.
Email reaches the person who wrote the code, not a ticket queue. There are no ads and no data collection, partly because there is no company that would benefit from either. Features arrive when a real communicator needs them.
Replies can take a few days. There is no phone line and no around-the-clock support. Bugs get fixed as fast as one person can fix them, which is sometimes fast and sometimes not. If that is not enough for your situation, a funded AAC app may genuinely serve you better, and that is a reasonable choice to make.
The fair question to ask of any one-person project. Your board is not held hostage to it: nothing lives on a server, backups are files on your own device, and the board exports to Open Board Format — the same format other AAC apps read. If this app disappeared tomorrow, the board you built would open somewhere else.
How it is paid for
It isn't, really. There is no revenue: no subscription, no paid tier, no ads, and nothing held back behind a donation. The running costs are a domain name and a Play Store developer account.
If the app has been useful in your house and you would like to put something toward the time that goes into it, there are a couple of ways to do that on the support page — but everything in the app is there either way.
The picture symbols
The symbols the app ships with are not mine. They are made by ARASAAC — author Sergio Palao, owned by the Government of Aragón in Spain — and offered free for non-commercial use like this under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. This app is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
Symbol search reaches further, through Global Symbols, which brings dozens of free AAC libraries behind one search. Each result belongs to its own publisher under its own licence, and the app names which library every picture came from.
The short version
- Made by
- Hunter Barnett
- Company
- None. One person.
- Cost
- Free, with no paid tier
- Your data
- Stays on your device
- Platform
- Android, iPhone and iPad
- Contact
- hbarnett@malachispeaks.com
If something in the app is wrong, confusing, or missing for the person you are supporting, tell me. That is genuinely how most of it got built.
— Hunter