Give every child a way to speak.
A phone-first AAC app and a shared progress dashboard. Your child taps to talk, you talk to the journal, and your speech therapist, OT, teachers and pediatrician all work from the same record — with reports ready for the next appointment or IEP meeting.
Built for the phone in your pocket. Nothing to install, nothing to buy.
Core words + folders. Tiles never move.
Tap through the real screens — core board, your child's photo tiles, and their progress.
Everything below is the real app.
No mock-ups from a design deck — these are live components pulled straight out of Parla.
A board that never moves.
Tiles never move. Same word, same square, every single day — that's the motor planning SLPs insist on.
Photograph the real bear, the real dog, the real snack. First words come fastest for things a child already loves.
Every report is generated from your own logged data and mapped to ABLLS-R style domains, so the team can act on it immediately.
Set up once, then it just quietly builds your child's story.
Tell us about your child
A 3-minute intake covers how they ask for things, spoken vocabulary, diagnoses, therapies, sleep, toileting and what matters most socially.
They talk. You log. Your team adds notes.
Your child uses the board; you tap Log event and just say what happened; invited therapists, teachers and aides add session notes to the same record. Every tile tap and every sentence becomes structured data.
One dashboard everyone shares
Daily focus suggestions match their actual level, insight cards surface correlations, and one tap produces the report for your SLP, the IEP team or your pediatrician.
Most AAC apps stop at the last tile tap. Ours starts there.
Parla quietly records what your child says, listens to what you tell it about your day, and turns both into a living clinical picture: trend charts, correlations, milestone progress and a report you can hand to a therapist, a school team or a paediatrician.
Talk, don't type
Tap the sherbert button and just say what happened: “He used STOP instead of hitting today, but he barely slept.” The journal transcribes it, then an AI parser pulls out the milestone, the behavior, the sleep value and the mood — and files each one in the right clinical domain.
Every tap becomes data
Board activations, unique words, spontaneous vs. prompted use, category coverage and time-of-day patterns are logged automatically while your child plays. You never fill in a form.
Trend lines, not vibes
14-, 30- and 90-day charts of vocabulary growth, total activations, sleep hours, meltdown counts and requesting rate. You can finally see the slope instead of guessing at it.
Insight cards
The engine correlates your logged variables and surfaces plain-language findings: “Meltdowns are 2.4× more likely on days after under 7 hours of sleep,” or “Requesting doubles on OT days.”
Adaptive daily focus
Your intake sets a functional baseline across communication, toileting, feeding, regulation and social domains — so today's suggestion matches where your child actually is, not a generic “find a first word.”
Signal quality built in
Repeat taps inside 90 seconds are counted separately, prompted trials are flagged, and streaks never inflate progress. The numbers hold up when a clinician looks at them.
Everyone who works with your child, finally looking at the same page.
Non-speaking kids lose the most in the gaps — between home and school, between the SLP and the OT, between the last appointment and the next one. Parla is the one place all of it lands. Invite a co-parent, a speech therapist, an OT, a classroom teacher or a behavior tech, each with permissions that match their role, and every tile tap, session note and journal entry builds the same timeline.
- Role-based invites: co-parent, SLP, OT, teacher, aide — revoke anytime.
- Providers write session notes; parents see them in plain language.
- A progression ledger shows what moved forward, what slid back, and when.
- One tap produces the report for an IEP meeting, an SLP re-eval, or a pediatric visit.
Talk to Pip about the day. Snap photo tiles. See what's actually moving.
Push board layouts home, set goals, and write session notes against real usage.
Same board, same button positions in class — plus classroom notes the family can read.
A dated 30/60/90-day summary at the visit instead of “he seems to be doing better.”
Home logs + classroom notes + therapy sessions come out as a single dated summary — IEP present-levels for school, goal evidence for the SLP, and a developmental snapshot for the pediatrician.
A ladder, not a scoreboard.
Every goal in Parla comes from a catalog of functional communication milestones organised into developmental rungs. You pick two or three to work on; the app watches for evidence of them in your child's board use and in your journal entries, then moves each goal from focus to emerging to achieved on its own.
- Goals are pre-selected from your intake, so nobody starts at the wrong rung.
- Progress bars fill from real evidence — tile taps and dated journal quotes.
- Achieved milestones keep their evidence trail for your next appointment.
- Nothing ever tells you your child is behind. It only shows the next step.
Reaches, leads you by the hand, cries to signal a need.
Taps MORE or WANT on the board to get something specific.
WANT + SNACK, GO + OUTSIDE, MY + TURN.
Comments, protests, jokes, asks questions, greets people.
Example view. Your child's ladder is built from their own intake answers and fills in from their real activity.
Every report is generated from your own logged data and mapped to ABLLS-R style domains, so the team can act on it immediately.
One tap turns eight weeks of life into a document your team respects.
You already know your child better than anyone in the room. The report is what makes that knowledge count: dated, quantified, and written in clinical language, generated from the data you were already producing by living your day.
Vocabulary counts, activation totals, category coverage, and behavior trends over the window you choose.
Each achieved goal with the date and the quoted journal entry or tile sequence that demonstrated it.
The sleep, gut, sensory and therapy variables that moved alongside communication and behavior.
Session notes from your SLP, OT or teacher are folded into the same document, alongside a ledger of skills that moved forward or slipped back.
Written in the terms SLPs and school teams use for present-levels, and short enough to hand a pediatrician or developmental peds team at a 20-minute visit.
Kids learn speech with their eyes as much as their ears.
Audiovisual speech research is consistent: seeing a mouth form a sound improves perception and imitation, and many autistic children lean on visual articulation cues even more heavily. So every word in Parla is spoken by a warm, lifelike voice and shaped by an animated mouth driven by real viseme timing — never a generic up-and-down flap. It can be switched off in one tap.
Read the research summariesShown in the app only while a word is spoken.
The non-negotiables SLPs check for — all in the free version.
Modified Fitzgerald Key
Pronouns yellow, verbs green, nouns orange — the same colour grammar SLPs already teach.
Grammar & morphology
Long-press any word for plurals, tenses and -ing endings instead of hunting a second board.
Guided word finder
Search dims the board and lights the exact path to the word, so the route gets learned too.
Parent PIN & edit lock
The board can't be rearranged mid-session by curious fingers. Motor planning stays intact.
Natural AI voices
Warm, child-appropriate text-to-speech with adjustable rate — not a robotic 2004 synth.
Signal-quality filtering
Repeat taps within 90 seconds are counted separately so stimming never inflates progress.
How we stack up against paid AAC apps.
We kept every clinical rule the gold-standard apps built their reputation on, then added the progress layer they never had.
Questions parents ask us first.
Is Parla really free?+
Yes. No trial, no ads, no locked tiles, no per-voice purchases. Paid AAC apps commonly cost $249–$300; we think a child's voice shouldn't sit behind that.
Will using AAC stop my child from talking?+
The research says the opposite. Reviews by Millar, Light & Schlosser (2006) and Schlosser & Wendt (2008) found no evidence of AAC suppressing speech, and most participants gained speech. Kasari et al. (2014) found adding a speech-generating device increased spontaneous communication.
Do I have to install anything?+
No. Parla runs in any modern phone, tablet or desktop browser, and you can add it to your home screen so it opens like an app.
Will the buttons move around?+
Never on their own. The core grid is spatially fixed for motor planning — raising the vocabulary level reveals additional buttons instead of rearranging existing ones, and edits are gated behind a parent PIN.
Who can see my child's data?+
You. Data is stored against your account with row-level security, and reports are generated for you to share with whoever you choose.
Is this a replacement for speech therapy?+
No. Parla is a tool that makes therapy more effective by giving your child a voice between sessions and giving your SLP better data. It is not medical advice or a diagnosis.
Learn what actually helps.
Understanding the Levels of Autism
A plain-language guide to Autism Spectrum Disorder Levels 1, 2, and 3 — what they mean, what they don't, and how support needs vary across each level.
ReadThe Gut–Brain Connection in Autism
How the vagus nerve, microbiome diversity, and inflammation may influence behavior, mood, and communication — and what parents can actually do about it.
ReadChildhood Apraxia of Speech and AAC
Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a motor-planning disorder — the brain knows the word, but can't tell the mouth how to make it. AAC removes the traffic jam.
ReadYour child has something to say today.
Set up the board in a couple of minutes. Free, forever, on the phone already in your pocket.
Open Parla