How Monster Speech is built
Monster Speech is an arcade of 45 games that hold a therapist's target words. This page explains the three decisions that shape it: how the story library is written, who controls when a prompt appears, and what a student can actually practice. It also says plainly who built it and what it does not try to be.
The Explicit Anchor method, and why the picture never changes
The story library holds roughly 90 passages built from about 30 illustrated scenes. Every scene is written more than once, at different reading levels, and the illustration stays the same across all of them. The event in the picture is the anchor. Changing the reading level changes how demanding the language is without changing what the student is reasoning about.
In practice that means a student who has already seen the Grumble ambush on the walk to school can reread it with longer sentences and more embedded clauses, and the comprehension questions still point at the same events. A therapist can step the level up or down mid-session when a passage lands too easily, and nothing about the picture or the plot resets. Each passage carries its own comprehension questions, and passages come in narrative, informational, and inference flavors so story work is never only storytelling.
"Explicit Anchor" is our own name for this build rule, not a published protocol or an externally validated method. We describe it here so you can judge the approach for yourself.
Manual turn control: a prompt card never opens by itself
Nothing in Monster Speech decides that it is time for a student to talk. Prompt cards do not appear when a game starts, when a round is won, when a timer runs out, or when a student taps something. The only thing that opens a card is the therapist pressing Targets, and the only thing that closes it is the therapist closing it.
This is a constraint on every game, not a setting. It exists because an auto-firing prompt takes the turn away from the person running the session: it interrupts a repair, talks over a student who was already trying, and forces the therapist to work around the software instead of with it. Scoring works the same way. Stars come from playing the game and from the therapist awarding them, and no part of the app judges whether a production was correct.
What a student can practice
The goal list runs to around 107 targets, weighted the way a school caseload actually is:
- Articulation and phonology — 60 goals.
- Receptive language — 14 goals.
- Expressive language — 11 goals.
- Grammar — 12 goals.
- Executive function — 4 goals.
Articulation targets are organized by sound and by position in the word, including CVC words, and each one offers single words, phrases, and sentences so a therapist can move up or down a level without leaving the goal. Story and vocabulary goals offer more than one reading level, picked from the roster. A therapist who would rather use their own list can type the words in and skip the goal picker entirely.
The counts above are read from the library when this page is built rather than written by hand, because goals and games get added most weeks. Treat them as a description of the shape of the library, not a catalog. We deliberately do not publish a total word count: the word lists change too often for that number to stay honest, and the words that matter in a session are the ones the therapist typed in anyway.
About the developer
Monster Speech is built by a software developer, not a clinician. I am married to a speech-language pathologist, which is how I ended up watching this work up close for years.
What I kept seeing was a gap. The tools that held a child's attention took a long time to set up, and the tools you could open in ten seconds did not hold attention. Sessions are short, caseloads are long, and the setup time was coming straight out of the practice time. So I built the thing I kept hearing was missing: an arcade a therapist can open cold, with no rosters to prepare and nothing to install, that a child actually wants to play.
The direction comes from front-line SLPs rather than from me. The goal list, the reading levels, the passage types, and the decision to keep every prompt on the therapist's own tap all came out of that feedback, and the arcade keeps changing as more of it arrives. If you use this and something is wrong, I would rather hear it: founder@vybetechnologiesllc.com.
What this is not
Monster Speech is an engagement tool for a session a qualified person is already running. It is not a medical device, an assessment, a screener, or a diagnostic instrument, and it does not generate clinical recommendations. It makes no claim to be HIPAA compliant: it is built so that student names, word lists, and scores never leave your browser in the first place, which you can read about in our privacy policy.
We publish no efficacy figures, because we have not run the studies that would justify them. Clinical judgment, goal selection, and progress decisions stay entirely with the therapist. See our Terms of Service for the full disclaimer.