Grid Player app review: speaking clearly for you

Grid Player

Price: Free

Grid Player by Sensory Software International is a medical app that is meant to help those who aren't able to communicate through speech. The app allows you to create sentences and then play them out loud for people to hear. This is ideal for people who cannot talk or even have a hard time with speech and being understood.

The app was updated on May 16, 2013 and is available in English, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

 

User Experience
This app is meant to be used on the go so that you can clearly communicate with others when speech is not possible or not clear enough to be used. Because it is an app it is completely portable and it can even be used for those people who use symbols.

It should be noted that this app is meant to be used with The Grid 2 that lets you play grids on your iPad. If you don't happen to have The Grid 2 you can still use the app but you'll need four complete grid sets. These are Talking Photographs, Symbol Talker B, Symbol Talker A, and Text Talker Phrasebook.

Another requirement is that you have an online Grids account. This account is free to create.

Features
The app features both female and male voices that are all high quality, crisp, clear, and easy to understand. You can use the TouchType word prediction when entering in your text. For large topics you'll be given a word list. There are also prediction suggestions for symbols, which is meant to aid in word recognition. When you're finished with inputting text you can actually copy full sentences and post them to Facebook and Twitter.

If you take a look at the individual Grid sets the text talk phrasebook features 10 topics, 100 instant phrases, and buttons that are used for quick response. The talking photograph set features 42 categories and more than 1,000 pictures. Meanwhile symbol talker A and B uses Widgit symbols, two vocabulary sizes, more than 50 topics, and over 2,000 unique words.

 

Update Info
In the most recent update to version 1.5 the app now supports the Greek language.

 

Customer Ratings and Feedback Comments
The app currently has 33 customer ratings with an average rating of four out of five stars.

 

Personal Comments by Reviewer
This app is a very specialized one for people with specific requirements and for those individuals it can make a large difference in the quality and level of communication with others. I liked that you were given so many ways to communicate thanks to the Grid sets. However, this isn’t simple a download-and-launch kind of app' there are a lot of requirements you need to meet in order to use it, such as having The Grid 2 and an online account.

 

Pros

• Makes communication with people quicker and easier if you are unable to speak or having problems with your speech being understandable
• Supports a large amount of languages
• Supports symbols
• Offers both male and female voices to speak your phrases/words
• Text input is fast and easy and offers word predictions

 

Cons

• You need to have an online Grid account to use the app
• Your mobile device needs to have The Grid 2 loaded on it or the four complete Grid sets in order to use this app

 

For: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad with iOS 5.0 or later. Grid Player is optimized for iPhone 5.