About Soundame

Soundame is a set of screen-free audio and voice games for children 6 and up, and older children and grown-ups play them too. A real-world sound or a spoken question plays; the child answers out loud, or turns the phone to face a sound placed around them. There is no reading and no on-screen choices. The screen dims as the child gets rounds right, and the game is played by ear.

The games

• Seek: a sound sits somewhere around the child, who rotates to face it and holds still to collect it.
• Memo: several sounds are placed around the child, go quiet, and one plays again. The child turns to where it was and taps anywhere to answer.
• Sound Guess: a real-world sound plays and the child says out loud what it is.
• Echo: the game says a run of words and the child repeats them back. The run grows.
• First Sound, coming soon: the game says one speech sound and names three words that start with it, and the child says one. English only.

The two speaking games, Sound Guess and Echo, use the microphone to hear the answer. Seek and Memo use the phone's orientation sensor and never request the microphone at all.

Who makes it

Marko Berkes builds Soundame, a set of screen-free voice games for children. He is an architect by training and has worked as a software engineer for ten years. He is not a teacher, a clinician, or a child-development researcher, and Soundame's writing says so wherever it matters.

Soundame is an independent product, not a studio with a catalogue. It is young and still being shaped.

Where it runs, and what it costs

Soundame runs in any modern mobile browser and installs as a web app on iPhone or Android. English, German and Italian are live; Spanish and Serbian are written and tested but not yet released. An Android version is in Google Play closed testing.

Thirty minutes a day are free, with no account. Unlimited play is a subscription: a 7-day free trial, then $3.99 a month for one child or $6.99 a month for a family.

What it is not

• Not speech therapy. It was not designed by a speech-language pathologist, it assesses nothing, and no study shows it improves speech, reading or attention.
• Not a story player. If you want audiobooks or stories, a Yoto or a Toniebox is the better answer.
• Not a physical device. It uses a phone you already own, which some families specifically do not want.
• Not silent. The speaking games need the child to talk, so they are a poor fit for a restaurant, a plane, or a car with a sleeping baby.

Your child's voice

When a child answers, the audio is streamed to a speech-to-text service, turned into text, and discarded. The recording is never stored and the transcript is not retained. There is no third-party advertising and no tracking of children. The privacy policy has the detail, and account deletion is self-serve.

Contact

Feedback, ideas and bug reports are genuinely welcome at [email protected]. There is also a blog covering screen-free play, listening, and what voice games can and cannot do.