“I found an app.” “There is a YouTube channel that teaches speech.” “My cousin in Dubai said her son learned to talk from videos.” We hear some version of this most weeks, and the question underneath is always the same: do we really need a therapist, or can we do this with a phone?
The honest answer has two halves. Apps and videos can be genuinely useful, and some of what they offer is better than nothing for a family with no therapist within reach. But they do a different job from a therapist, and when they are used instead of one, children lose time they do not get back. This page sets out which job is which.
What a speech therapy app is actually doing
Strip away the cartoons and most speech apps do one of a small number of things:
- Show a picture and say a word. Flashcards with sound. Useful for vocabulary, meaningless for a child who is not yet trying to talk.
- Ask the child to repeat a sound or word, sometimes with a reward animation. Useful for a child who can already produce the sound and needs practice. Useless, and sometimes harmful, for a child who cannot, because the app rewards whatever the child says.
- Give the child buttons to press to “say” things. This is a communication aid, not a teaching tool, and for the right child it can be life-changing. See pictures, signs and devices.
- Play games that need listening or following instructions. Helpful for attention and understanding, if an adult is sitting beside the child.
- Offer a programme of lessons for the parent to deliver. These vary enormously, and the good ones are closer to parent coaching than to an app.
YouTube channels mostly do the first two things with a human face and a lot of repetition. Some are made by qualified therapists and are sound. Many are made by people with a camera and good intentions. There is no way to tell from the view count.
What they are good for
Practice between sessions. A child working on a particular sound needs to say it many times a week, and a therapist cannot be there for most of those. An app that gives a child a reason to say “sun, sock, soup” fifty times with a smile is doing real work, provided the therapist has confirmed the child can produce the sound correctly.
Vocabulary, for a child who is already talking. Pictures with words, categories, opposites, action words. Fine, in small doses, as a supplement to talking about real things.
Showing a parent what to do. A short video of a therapist modelling how to pause and wait, how to expand a child’s one word into two, or how to play a turn-taking game, can be worth more than a page of written instructions. We use video for exactly this in our online sessions.
Motivation for a reluctant practiser. Some children will do for a tablet what they will not do for a parent. Used carefully and briefly, that is a lever, not a sin.
Bridging a gap. A family in a town with no therapist, or on a waiting list, or between two homes, can keep momentum with a well-chosen app and a structured home plan. Our speech therapy at home guide is built for that situation.
What they cannot do
They cannot hear your child. This is the whole problem in one sentence. A therapist listening to a child say “tat” for “cat” hears which sound is wrong, where in the mouth it is going wrong, whether it is a pattern across many words or a one-off, and whether it is typical for the age or a sign of something else. An app hears a noise and plays a star animation.
They cannot tell you what is actually wrong. A child who is not talking at two and a half may have a language delay, a hearing problem, a motor speech difficulty, autism, or simply be a late bloomer. The right help is different for each. No app assesses this, and a YouTube channel that claims to is selling something. See why is my toddler not talking for the real list of possibilities.
They cannot adapt. A good session changes direction every few minutes depending on what the child just did. An app follows its script whether the child is bored, confused, upset or ready for more.
They cannot coach you. Most of the progress a young child makes comes from how the adults around them talk, wait, respond and play, all day, every day. Teaching a parent to do that well is the biggest part of our job and it does not come in an app. Why parent involvement matters explains why.
They cannot build the thing that comes before words. A child who does not yet look at your face, share attention over a toy, point, or copy actions is not ready for flashcards, and no amount of screen time will get them there. Those foundations are built between two people. See what is joint attention.
They can teach the wrong thing very efficiently. A child who practises a sound incorrectly fifty times a day with cheerful rewards is getting better at saying it wrong. We spend real session time undoing this.
The under-three problem
For children under about three, there is a further issue. Very young children learn language from people who respond to them: a parent who notices what the child is looking at and names it, waits for a sound, and answers it. A screen does not respond to the child. It talks at them. Children can learn words from a video, but they learn them more slowly and less flexibly than from a person, and every hour in front of a screen is an hour not spent in the back-and-forth that builds language.
For a toddler who is late to talk, the practical rule we give families is simple: no app or video is a speech activity for this age. Real speech activities are the ones in easy speech activities to do at home, and they involve a face, a toy and a lot of waiting. The relationship between screens and late talking is set out in screen time and speech delay.
The YouTube trap
A particular pattern deserves its own warning. A child who is not talking much is given a phone to keep them calm. The parent, worried about speech, chooses “educational” channels: letters, colours, nursery rhymes in English. The child watches for hours, becomes very good at reciting the alphabet, and talks less to the family than before. Sometimes the child begins to speak in an accent and phrases from the videos, and only in those phrases.
Every part of this is understandable, and we see it constantly in Multan homes where a parent is managing several children and a house alone. But reciting is not communicating, and a child who can sing the alphabet song in an American accent but cannot ask for water has not learned language from the videos. They have learned to perform them. The way out is not a better channel. It is less screen and more of the back-and-forth in healthy screen time habits.
If you are going to use an app, use it well
- Ask your therapist which one, and for what. The right app for sound practice is wrong for vocabulary and useless for a non-verbal child. Match the tool to the goal.
- Sit beside your child. An app with a parent beside it is a shared activity. The same app alone is a screen. Repeat what the app says, add a word, ask a question, laugh together.
- Keep it short. Ten minutes of app practice a day, done daily, beats an hour on Sunday. Stop while the child still wants more.
- Carry it into real life. If the app taught “ball” today, find a ball. Say it, roll it, hide it. The word only becomes the child’s when it leaves the screen.
- Check that what is being practised is correct. If your child says the target sound wrongly, stop using the app for that sound until the therapist has taught it properly.
- Prefer Urdu, or at least your home language, for a young child. A child who hears Urdu or Saraiki all day and practises English on a screen is building two thin languages instead of one strong one. See raising a bilingual child.
- Notice when it is a substitute. If the app has quietly become the only speech work happening, that is the moment to book a session.
A fair comparison
Think of it the way you would think of a maths app for a child struggling at school. It can give practice. It can make drills bearable. It cannot sit the child down, find out that they never understood place value, explain it three ways until one lands, and then tell the parent what to do at home. That is what a teacher is for. A speech therapist is that teacher for talking.
Our view, after watching a lot of families try the app-only route, is this: use the tools, keep the person. If money is the obstacle, say so to us. A few sessions of assessment and parent coaching, followed by a home plan that uses whatever apps help, is a far better use of a limited budget than months of screen practice pointed in the wrong direction. The options are on our fees page.
Three families, three different answers
A two-year-old in Bosan Road who says five words. The family has downloaded three apps. Our advice: delete them for now. At this age the work is face-to-face, and the fastest progress will come from the parents learning to wait, follow the child’s interest and expand what he says. Six weeks of parent coaching, then review.
A five-year-old in Cantt who says “tat” for “cat”. The sound has been taught in two sessions and she can now produce it on its own. An app that drills K words with a reward animation is a fine tool for daily practice, used for ten minutes with a parent beside her, with the therapist checking the sound every fortnight.
A seven-year-old in Khanewal with no therapist nearby. The family travels to Multan once a month. Between visits, a video call with us, a written home plan, and an app chosen for the current goal keep the work going. Here the app is a bridge, and it is doing real work because a person is steering it.
The same app is right for one of these children and wrong for the other two. That is the whole point.
For the practice that works without any screen at all, tongue twisters for speech practice has English and Roman-Urdu twisters sorted by sound. And for families abroad trying to keep Urdu speech going with no local therapist, online speech therapy in Urdu abroad explains how we run that.