AAC App Comparison

Ryan's Voice vs TouchChat: an honest comparison

TouchChat has been a mainstay of AAC for over a decade, and its WordPower vocabularies are used in clinics worldwide. Ryan's Voice takes a different approach. Here are the real differences — pricing, vocabulary design, apraxia support and privacy — so you can pick the right fit rather than the loudest marketing.

Side-by-side

Prices observed on the US and Australian App Store listings, 6 August 2026. AAC apps go on sale periodically — always check the current listing.

Where TouchChat is the better choice

We would rather you got the right app than our app. TouchChat is likely the better fit when:

• The user needs an alternative access method. Switch scanning, head pointing and auditory scanning are core TouchChat strengths. Ryan's Voice is touch-only today.
• You want a structured, research-based motor-planning vocabulary. WordPower is well established, widely taught, and many SLPs already know how to programme and coach it.
• Deep customisation matters. If you need to build and reorganise boards, control grammar features, and manage a large personalised symbol vocabulary, TouchChat gives you far more control.
• The user is an emerging communicator learning single words. Symbol-first, word-by-word systems are designed for exactly this stage.
• You need cross-platform. PRC-Saltillo supports platforms beyond iOS; Ryan's Voice is iPhone and iPad only.

Where Ryan's Voice is different

1. You can start without paying

TouchChat's base app is a one-time purchase, with the WordPower bundle costing more again. That is a real barrier when a family is already paying for therapy, and it means committing money before knowing whether the approach suits the user. Ryan's Voice inverts that: the complete communication app — 1,120+ phrases across 27 topics, text-to-speech, favourites, custom phrases and Quick SOS — is free to download and use. Only the AI conversation layer is paid.

2. Phrases, not word-by-word building

Published research reports aided AAC communication rates typically under 15 words per minute, and as low as 2–5 for letter-by-letter spelling (Beukelman & Light, 2020). For someone with apraxia of speech, each additional selection is another motor-planning step — and conversations move on while the sentence is still being built. Ryan's Voice front-loads that work: one tap speaks a whole, natural utterance. The trade-off is honest — pre-written phrases are less infinitely generative than word-by-word construction. For users who can build word by word at speed, that flexibility may matter more.

3. The app follows the conversation

With Smart Voice, the app listens to the person you are talking with, detects the topic in real time, and surfaces phrases that actually fit the moment. When the topic shifts from school to food, the suggestions shift too. What matters most to us is where it happens: this runs locally, on the device, rather than on a server.

4. Privacy is architectural, not a policy promise

Speech recognition, topic detection, phrase ranking and AI generation all run on the phone. No account, no cloud, no analytics SDKs, nothing transmitted. It works in a hospital basement with no signal. Conversations between a parent and a child are too intimate to leave the device.

5. Adult-level language by default

The phrase library came from years of real speech-therapy sessions with a literate, capable teenager — including phrases like "She seems disappointed by the outcome." It covers 100% of the Universal Core 36 (UNC Chapel Hill Center for Literacy and Disability Studies) while sounding like an adult, not a worksheet.

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