About Soundame

Soundame is a set of five voice-controlled, screen-free audio games for children roughly 6 to 10 years old. 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, no on-screen choices, and nothing to tap once a round starts — the screen goes dark and the game is played by ear.

The five games

• 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.
• I Spy — the game says one speech sound and the child says a word starting with it. English only.
• Seek — a sound sits somewhere around the child, who rotates to face it and holds still to collect it.
• Memo — several sounds are placed in space and the child has to hold them in memory.

The three spoken games 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 and Italian are live; German, Spanish and Serbian are written and tested but not yet released. An Android version is in Google Play closed testing.

Five minutes a day are free on the web with no account. 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 three spoken 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.