Soundly: First Words & Sounds

Tap an animal. Hear the animal. 360 photo flashcards, 361 real recorded sounds, 19 languages. Soundly is 360 photographs and 361 real recorded sounds, made for children who are still learning what things are called. No cartoons standing in for the real thing, and no synthesised noises. A cow photographed in a field, and the sound that cow actually makes. SIX WORLDS, SEVENTY-TWO THINGS Farm animals. Wild animals. Instruments. Vehicles. Everyday life. Around the house. Twelve things in every world, each with five photographs and five different sounds, so a child who taps the same dog five times hears five different dogs. BUILT FOR EYES THAT ARE TWO The pickers are bold clip art with a heavy outline, because a small child recognises a thing by its shape long before its colour or its size. Then the photograph arrives full screen, because that is what carries into the real world. The cartoon is the door. The photograph is the room. GROWS WITH THEM Start with pictures and sounds alone. Add the spoken name when they are ready for words. Add the written word when they start to read. Then add a second language. Every one of those is a switch you control, and Soundly sets itself up for your child's age the first time you open it. NINETEEN LANGUAGES English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Vietnamese. The word on the photograph and the voice that says it always match, so a child never sees one language and hears another. The language your child is learning is a separate choice from the language you read. A Norwegian family can have Norwegian menus and an English-speaking app. MADE FOR SMALL HANDS No advertising. No tracking. No accounts. No analytics of any kind, and not one line of code that talks to the internet — everything is inside the app, so it works on a plane, in a car, and in a waiting room with no signal. Buying, the privacy policy and every setting sit behind a parental gate. There is a tap lock that ignores the first few seconds of a photograph so it is not skipped by accident, and instructions for Guided Access, which is the only thing that genuinely keeps a child inside one app. ONE PAYMENT Farm Animals is free, for as long as you like. One payment unlocks the other five worlds, every voice and every language, for good. No subscription. Soundly first shipped in 2013 and has been rebuilt from the ground up.