Spoken Features You Might Not Know About

At its core, Spoken is a powerful app that helps you communicate. Its word prediction capability makes it easy to create complex sentences. The voices are customizable and lifelike, and phrases can be saved for quick access in the future. But, there are also less visible features that can seriously enhance your experience with the app. Let’s take a look at some of those tools such as drawing and writing canvases to input text, Show Large mode, and location-based word predictions.

Have you tried these features?

Show Large Mode

Show Large mode is a simple but useful tool. This feature allows you to display your words in large text to people around you. This is particularly helpful in a loud setting such as a restaurant or airplane where audio from your device can be difficult to hear. To use it, enter the word or phrase you want to show, long press on the speaker icon, and tap “Show Large”. Once you’re on the Show Large screen, you can tap the speaker to hear the phrase again. Just tap the arrows in the top corner to leave Show Large mode and return to the main screen.

Adjust the Speed and Pitch of Your Selected Voice

Something that sets Spoken apart from other augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps is its wide selection of natural-sounding voices. The developers have worked hard to make the voices expressive and non-robotic sounding. Something less well-known is that each voice can be customized to suit your needs. To do this, tap the slider icon on your selected voice, then adjust the top slider for speed (turtle for slow and rabbit for fast) and bottom slider for pitch. To hear a sample of the voice after your edits, tap the small speaker icon. When you’re done, press the “Select and Save” button to lock in your changes.

Share a Phrase to Text, Social Media, or Other Apps

Sharing a phrase created in Spoken is a useful feature that can save a lot of time. It’s helpful if, for instance, you craft a phrase and want to text it to a friend. To do this, enter the phrase you want to share, long press on the speaker icon, and tap “Share Text.” Then, choose the app you want to share the phrase to from the list that appears. Similarly, there is an option to share your phrase as an audio file if you want the recipient to hear your selected voice.

Write or Draw to Input Text

Writing or drawing to input text is one of the coolest features of Spoken that users might not know about. In addition to using the keyboard to type, you can also draw or write on the canvas to get word predictions. To write, tap the cursive “A” icon next to the keyboard icon, or tap the crayon icon to draw. If you want to input text directly from the canvas, tap the arrow and rectangle icon in the bottom right corner. To clear the canvas tap the “x.”

In writing mode, word predictions will appear with each letter you write, just like the keyboard. If you see the word you want in the list, you can select it before you’ve completed writing the word.

In drawing mode, Spoken will try to guess what you’re sketching and provide a list of predictions ordered by how closely they match your drawing. This is especially useful for users who have trouble with word recall but can visualize what they need to talk about.

Get Word Predictions Based on Your Location

Another great feature of Spoken is location-based word predictions. With location-based word predictions turned on, your predictions will be much more relevant to your context. For example, if you enter “I want some” with the “eating” context enabled, you’ll get predictions like “lunch”, “food”, “napkins”, and “coffee.”

Your location can be detected automatically if you turn on “Change Context Based on My Location” in the settings, or you can manually choose the context from the list. Currently, Spoken can predict words for eating, shopping, medical, and school contexts; if you have suggestions for more let us know!

Fill-in-the-Blank Saved Phrases

You probably know about Spoken’s Saved Phrases feature already, but did you know you can leave the end of a saved phrase blank and Spoken will suggest words to complete it? This can make your saved phrases much more versatile by letting you adapt them to specific situations.

For example, if you save the incomplete phrase “I would like a,” you can select it later and Spoken will move it back into the text box. From there, you can finish the sentence by typing or selecting a prediction like “coffee” or “sandwich.” This feature can be a huge time saver!

Alert Others Before You Speak

Sometimes, you might want to let others know you are about to say something. Spoken has a great feature just for that purpose! Simply tap the exclamation icon in the top left corner to play an alert. If it’s your first time using the feature, you may be asked to allow Spoken to use your phone’s camera — this is just so the app can access the flashlight. After you’ve enabled the camera permissions, the flash should trigger and a chime will play. You can turn the flash on or off in the settings and select a different attention sound. If you want the alerts to happen automatically before you speak, just turn on the “Get Attention When I Speak” setting.

Take a Short Quiz to Personalize Your Word Predictions

In order for Spoken to learn a bit more about you and give more relevant predictions, a short quiz can be completed. To do this, tap “Personalize My Predictions” in the settings, then go through the questions that ask things like your name, your pets’ names, and places you might talk about. Please note that these predictions will not appear until you’ve spoken at least 200 words in the app.

Add Words to Spoken’s Vocabulary

Although Spoken knows over 60,000 words by default, there will always be some gaps in its predictions. If you ever notice a missing word, it’s easy to add it to the app so it appears in the future. Simply go to settings, tap “Add Vocabulary”, then type or copy/paste the words you want to add and tap “Add Word.” The copy and paste feature is particularly useful if you have many words or an entire passage of text to add. Note that if you’ve just installed the app and added words, they will not appear in the predictions until 200 words have been spoken in the app.

For specific ways to use this feature to your advantage, see our other article, Instantly Personalize Spoken with the “Add Vocabulary” Feature.

Use Large Print Mode and Word Dividers

If you are looking for increased readability, try using the large print and word dividers options. To enable these, just go to the settings and toggle on “Use Large Print” and/or “Show Word Dividers.” These simple accessibility features can make Spoken easier to use if you’re visually impaired.

Spoken has so many great features that you might not know about all of them. That’s ok! Hopefully we’ve helped you learn more about the lesser-known features of the app. Check the features out for yourself to see which ones you might benefit from. And, as always, let us know if there are features you want us to include in future versions of the app.