What AAC apps cost: the 40 AAC apps people use, checked by hand

More than half of these apps let a person talk without paying

Fourteen of the 40 are free to use in full, and another 9 speak for free and charge for extras such as your own photos, more pictures or better voices. That is 23 of 40 that a family can start with today at no cost. The most-rated of the free ones, Look to Speak, Leeloo AAC and Weave Chat AAC, have more ratings than most of the paid apps. The table below marks every one.

The big clinical apps are the expensive end. Five cost $200 or more to own: Proloquo2Go, by far the most-rated AAC app, at $249.99, and LAMP Words For Life at $299.99, Speak for Yourself at $299.99, TouchChat at $299.99 and CoughDrop at $294.99. The typical one-time price among the apps that sell one is $179.99.

Prices move: since our first check, Proloquo2Go went from $124.99 to $249.99 and Proloquo4Text went from $59.99 to $119.99 in the App Store: on October 18 they were half price. What the higher prices mostly buy is a large, carefully organized vocabulary and the training and support around it. Whether that is worth it depends on the person, which is a question for a speech-language pathologist, not for a price chart.

The apps you hear about first are iPad apps; on Android the choice is 30

Proloquo2Go, TD Snap, TouchChat, LAMP Words For Life and Speak for Yourself, the apps a family is most likely to hear about from a school or clinic, are all iPhone and iPad only: none has a version in the US Google Play store. They are five of the 10 apps on the list that are App Store only.

That makes the device and the app one decision. If an evaluation points to one of these apps, it comes with an iPad. If the family already has an Android tablet, the choice is the 30 apps on Google Play, including Speech Assistant AAC, Autism Kids: Voice & Routines, Look to Speak and Leeloo AAC, the most-rated there.

10 apps sell a subscription; ask what happens to the words if you stop paying

Ten of the 40 sell full use by subscription, at $35.90 to $119.99 a year. Four of them also sell a one-time or “lifetime” unlock, priced at one to three years of the subscription; six (Autism Kids: Voice & Routines, Otsimo AAC, Proloquo, Talkie, TD Snap and TippyTalk) offer no way to pay once.

For most apps a lapsed subscription is an inconvenience. For an AAC app it can mean the person loses words they use every day, or the pages someone spent months building. The listings rarely say what happens, so ask before you start: does the app keep working, can you export the pages, and in what format?

Most are maintained; the ones left behind are mostly free

Of the 40 apps, 32 were updated in the last year. Eight haven’t been updated in more than two years: PictoTalk (January 2016), LetMeTalk (August 2018), TalkinPictures (November 2019), ChatterBoards AAC (November 2020), Alexicom AAC (June 2021), Leeloo AAC (July 2023), SymboTalk (October 2023) and Aac Talking Tabs (November 2023). Six of those eight are free apps, which is the trade-off behind “free”: nobody may be paid to keep it working.

An app that isn’t updated can stop working after a system update on the tablet. Check the date before you build a person’s vocabulary in it, and prefer an app whose pages you can export.

Every app, with its price and where it runs

Sort by any column, or narrow the list to the apps that run on your device. This list is not a ranking: we didn’t test the apps, and ratings favor apps that have been around longest.