Soundame
Play a game
Bright colours, one more tap, and a fight when you ask for the phone back.
Soundame is played by ear instead. Your child listens, answers out loud or turns toward a sound, and the phone's screen stays dark. Older kids and grown-ups play too.
Scroll, and watch where the light goes
Your child taps Start once. The screen turns dark, with one soft light left on it, and everything bright about the game arrives as sound.
There are four games, with a fifth coming soon. In two, your child turns around the room to find sounds. In the other two, they answer out loud.
The talking games ask for the microphone at that same tap, and after it there's nothing else to press. Difficulty follows your child's age: a six-year-old gets a wider target in Seek and fewer sounds in Memo than a ten-year-old.
Sounds hide all around the room. Your child holds the phone like a compass and turns their whole body until the sound sits right in front of them.
Needs room to turn, and no microphone: it reads the phone's orientation sensor. Headphones help, because a phone speaker flattens direction into loudness.
Sounds are placed around the room, then go quiet. One plays again, and your child turns to where it was and taps anywhere to answer.
Needs room to turn. The one game with a tap, and the whole screen is the button. A six-year-old starts with two sounds, and a good round makes the next one bigger.
Stuck? They say "hint" or "again" out loud and the game answers. After three tries it tells them and moves on, kindly.
Works in a car seat. The glow shows whose turn it is: peach while the game talks, mint when it's listening, lavender while it thinks.
One more word every round. A miss plays the same run again, and three misses start it over, but the longest run stays, so there's always a number to beat, a sibling's included.
Works in a car seat, like Sound Guess.
Coming soon
The game says /sss/, names sun, snake and sock, and your child says one. A miss is never called wrong. The clue just gets bigger.
English only. It copies a Montessori classroom game, with the phone doing the asking.
Each game shows one soft picture, a glowing circle or a compass ring. It dims a step every time your child gets a round right, until there's almost nothing left to look at.
A tap brings it back for five seconds, because looking isn't failing. Every session starts with the picture back on, so a child never opens onto a black screen and wonders whether the game is broken.
No account, no card. When today's free time is up, the game stops by itself. It won't end every argument, but the one saying stop is the game.
Want more? Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, then $3.99 a month, or $6.99 for a family of up to four children.
Why turning off a screen ends in a meltdown, and where our own daily limit causes the same problem.
Pick a language on the home screen and every game switches over. Each word arrives right after the sound it names: the rooster crows, then the game says rooster, Hahn or gallo. That makes it a gentle way to hear a second language, too.
First Sound will be English only. Spanish and Serbian are written and tested, and come next.
In a Montessori classroom the sound games come first. I spy something that starts with /sss/, using the sound and not the letter. The Silence Game is the plainest version of all: sit together, close your eyes, listen for a minute, then name what you heard.
The reason that survived a hundred years is phonemic awareness, the ability to hear the individual sounds inside a spoken word. It predicts how easily a child later learns to read, and it can be taught. That finding is about as solid as anything in early reading research.
What is not established is that any particular app delivers it, and the gap between the skill mattering and a product building it in your child is where most children's-app marketing lives. We would rather stay on the near side of it. Ten of the original games, most needing nothing but your voice.
When your child answers out loud, the game sends that moment of audio to a speech-to-text service, gets back a word, and the audio is thrown away. No recording of their voice is kept, and Sound Guess and Echo only listen during your child's turn.
Seek and Memo never open the microphone at all. They read the phone's orientation sensor, the same one a compass app uses, to work out which way your child is facing. Those two keep playing if the connection drops, once their sounds are cached.
No advertising, no selling data, no tracking your child across the web. The privacy policy has the details.
Nobody has studied whether Soundame makes a child smarter, and we won't claim it does. The part we can stand behind is plainer. While your child plays, the phone has almost nothing to show them, so they listen, answer, and turn around the room with their eyes free.
No speech-language pathologist designed it. It does not assess anything, and it cannot tell a genuine mispronunciation from a bad microphone, so it is not speech therapy. It does not teach reading either: practising a building block is not the same as delivering the outcome. If you are worried about your child's speech, hearing or reading, talk to a clinician or a teacher. The longer version, about our own product.
What it is · Playing it · Privacy · Plans · What it isn't
Soundame is a set of screen-free audio games a child plays by listening and speaking, or by turning to face a sound, instead of tapping a screen. Four games are playable today, in this order: Seek (turn your body to face a hidden sound), Memo (remember where sounds were placed), Sound Guess (name the sound you hear) and Echo (repeat a growing run of spoken words). A fifth, First Sound, is coming soon. The picture on screen dims as your child gets rounds right, until there is almost nothing left to look at.
Soundame is made for children 6 and up, and there is no upper limit: older children, parents and grandparents play it too. Seek places a sound around you and you turn to face it. Memo places several sounds in space for you to remember. Sound Guess plays a real-world sound and you say what it is. Echo plays a growing run of spoken words for you to repeat back. Children under 6 play best with an adult alongside, because the vocabulary and the speech recognition both assume a child who talks in clear, whole words.
No. Soundame is voice-only. The child listens and speaks, and in three of the four games there is nothing to tap after pressing Start. The fourth, Memo, asks for one tap to lock in each answer, and the whole screen is the button. There is no reading anywhere, and no on-screen choices to navigate.
The screen dims once a round starts and fades further toward black as your child gets rounds right, and in three of the four games there is nothing to tap. Memo still needs a tap to lock in each answer. Either way the child is not watching the screen to play. It is still a phone, and we would rather say that plainly: if your goal is no phone in the house at all, a physical audio player like a Yoto or a Toniebox is the honest answer and an app is not.
A Yoto or Toniebox is a physical player: you buy a box plus cards or figures, and the child listens to stories. Soundame is a game rather than a player: the child answers out loud and the answer changes what happens next, so they are producing language instead of receiving it. It needs no hardware because it runs in a browser on a phone you already own, and it has a free tier. They solve different problems and plenty of families use both.
Yes. Soundame runs in Safari on iPhone and iPad, in Chrome on Android, and in Edge or Firefox on a desktop browser. It can be installed to the home screen as a web app for full-screen, app-like use on any of them. Seek and Memo use the device compass to sense which way the player is facing as they turn. Earphones are not required, and they matter most in Seek and Memo, which work by direction.
Not yet as a public download. Soundame runs directly in a mobile browser and installs to the home screen as a web app, which behaves like an app without an app-store listing. An Android version is in Google Play closed testing and is not publicly available yet, so play in the browser on Android in the meantime.
The two speaking games, Sound Guess and Echo, use the microphone to hear the child's answer, and that is the only thing it is used for. First Sound will work the same way. The two sensor games, Seek and Memo, never request the microphone at all; they use the phone's orientation sensor to tell which way the child is facing.
Two of the four games work in a car seat: Sound Guess and Echo, where the child only has to answer out loud. Seek and Memo do not, because they ask the child to turn their body to face a sound, which is impossible in a seatbelt. A spoken game is not a quiet game, so it is the wrong choice if a younger sibling is asleep in the next seat.
Partly. Once a session has cached the sound files, the two sensor games, Seek and Memo, keep playing if the connection drops. The two speaking games, Sound Guess and Echo, do not: a child's answer is transcribed by a server, so they need internet. Opening the app, the first load and account features also need a connection.
English, German and Italian are live today, and every game switches over when you pick a language on the home screen. Spanish and Serbian are written and tested but not yet released. First Sound will be English-only, because the speech sounds it works on are specific to a language. Many families who speak another language at home also use Soundame as listening practice for English.
Soundame stores a child's first name, age, and per-sound progress (which sounds they have heard and answered correctly) to personalize gameplay. Spoken answers are streamed to a speech-to-text service, turned into text, and discarded. The audio is never stored and the transcript is not retained. Soundame does not show advertising, sell data, or track children across the web. See the privacy policy for details.
No account is needed to try Soundame. A child gets 30 minutes of free play a day with no sign-up. An account only matters if you want unlimited play, or if you want to keep a child's profile and progress across devices.
Yes. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. You can cancel anytime during the trial and pay nothing. Free users without a subscription get 30 minutes of play per day.
Individual is $3.99 per month. Family is $6.99 per month and supports up to four child profiles in one household. Both plans include the 7-day free trial.
No. Soundame gives a child practice at listening carefully and answering out loud, which is genuinely useful, but it was not designed by a speech-language pathologist, it does not assess anything, and no study shows it improves speech, reading or attention. A child you are worried about needs an assessment from a clinician, not an app.
No. Soundame is a young product, made by an independent developer rather than a studio, and it is still being shaped. Four games are playable today and a fifth, First Sound, is coming soon. We welcome feedback, ideas, and bug reports at info@soundame.com.
A round costs nothing and takes less time than the argument you are avoiding. See what your child does with a dark screen and a sound in their ear.
