Talking Headz: SPeaking and Singing Made Extra Fun

Kids love cause and effect activities.  Pair this up with an activity that encourages talking or even singing, and your entire session will conclude with flying colors. Talking Headz merges these activities together by enabling you to make parodies of each other's voices.  Not only that: with this really cool app, you can make your own parody MOVIES!


Try downloading this app for free (yes, of course it's FREE) and tinker with it.  You'll find that you can:

• record voices and play it back
• choose what characters you want to play back your voice with
• modify your voice recording's pitch, speaking rate, and resonance
• use present voice settings (deep, high, robot, monster, overlord, etc.)
• change characters basing on the voice you have tweaked
• save as a movie and upload via email or YouTube
• or save as a movie and share via Facebook or Twitter

The free version of Talking Headz has several preset "headz" for you to tinker with, such as Green Apple, Baby, George Bush III, Chimp, Clown, Tabby Cat, Goldfish, Simon Cowell, Queen Elizabeth, and Spider.  You can download more headz via the App Store at $0.99 each.

You may be wondering what else can be done with this app aside from using this to encourage your kids to talk or imitate a target word or phrase.  We've tried using Talking Headz in our social skills group and the results were amazing and were engagingly funny.  Each of the kids in the group was given a minute to think up of a story line and they each took turns delivering a line. They all needed to think quickly and make sure the next line recorded is consistent with the previous script line.  After the entire story was recorded and played back, the kids loved how their voices sounded like while a clown, a fish, and a monkey was on the iPod Touch's screen.

What I love about this app: 

• easy-to-use interface
• preview bar of available headz on the top of the screen
• one can scroll across headz even during playback
• customizable voice settings, down to pitch and even resonance
• preset voices settings

What this app needs to improve on: 

• could use at least four more preset characters (boy, girl, man, woman) for a more functional video playback (family, school, play)
• eye movements, even generic eye movements to add to each headz's facial expressions

This app works across iDevices, but for the iPod Touch you will need an external microphone to enable voice recording.


Try it out as soon as you can.  Post a comment here and tell us how you used Talking Headz in your sessions or what your kid clients thought of it.

Price:  FREE 

Weight:  9.0 MB 

Updated:  18 September 2010

Version:  1.3 

Compatible with: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad.  Needs iOS 3.0 up.

Seller:  Gigabyte Solutions Ltd. @ Gigabyte Solutions Ltd.

Target Population:  kids across ages

Awesome if you want to work on:  

• facilitating production of speech
• facilitating imitation of sounds, target words, target phonemes
• turn-taking
• pretend play
• singing (or encouraging participation in singing)
• creating and delivering scripts for narratives
• story-telling, whether read or spontaneously created

Customer Ratings (iTunes):  4 out of 5 smileys

SPeak App says:    4 out of 5 smileys