About Help Me Talk

Who makes it

Help Me Talk is built by Yousef Zuriqi, an independent iOS and Android developer. There is no venture funding behind it and no team of growth marketers — the app is made, supported and paid for by the people who use it. That is worth knowing when you read anything on this site: we do not have a large budget to be wrong with.

The app first went on the App Store in 2021. Since then 10,000+ families have downloaded it. You can reach us directly at usefz89@gmail.com — replies come from a person.

Why it exists

Speech therapy runs on repetition. A child needs dozens of correct attempts at a sound, several times a week, for weeks. A therapist has maybe twenty minutes a week with them. The rest has to happen at home, and most parents are handed a photocopied word list and left to work out the rest.

Help Me Talk is built for that gap. It picks the words, plays a recorded lesson for the target sound, listens to what your child says, and scores it — so you can spend the five minutes encouraging your child rather than deciding whether that R was good enough.

Where the practice material comes from

The word bank inside the app runs to over 6,000+ words, phrases and sentences across 30 sounds, built up over years and organised so children see new material rather than the same ten cards. The free sound pages on this site are drawn from that same bank, with the same audio lessons — which is why they are unusually complete for something you do not have to pay for.

Age guidance on those pages follows the Iowa–Nebraska articulation norms (Smit, Hand, Bird & Bernthal), the same norms the app uses to suggest sounds by age. Developmental milestones on the guide pages come from the CDC, and general information about speech sound disorders from ASHA.

What it deliberately does not do

Help Me Talk does not screen, diagnose, or tell you whether your child has a speech disorder. That is not a missing feature — it is a decision. Those judgements need a qualified human who can hear your child, and an app that offers them from a phone is overselling.

Help Me Talk is a practice app, not a diagnosis or a replacement for a licensed speech-language pathologist. If you are worried about your child’s speech, talk to your doctor or an SLP — this app is for the practice in between.

How we write about competitors

This site compares Help Me Talk with other apps, and we make money if you choose ours. So we try to hold ourselves to three rules: every claim about another app is checked against its live store listing or its own published pricing before it goes up; every comparison names at least one thing the other app does better; and where another app is genuinely the better fit, we say so and send you there. You will find us ranked third on our own toddler roundup for exactly that reason.

If you find something on this site that is out of date or wrong, email us and we will fix it. Prices and store ratings in particular change without warning.

The app in numbers

• 30 speech sounds, each with a recorded lesson and mouth-position guidance
• 6,000+ practice items across words, phrases and sentences
• 10,000+ downloads since 2021
• 4.2 stars from 36 ratings on the US App Store — a small number, and we would rather show it than round it up
• On the App Store as “Speech Therapy - For Children” and on Google Play as “Help me talk - Speech Therapy”