This guide is for the grown-ups. It assumes you have never used a communication app before, and that you are reading it at the end of a long day. Nothing here is complicated, and you do not need to do all of it.
Your first ten minutes
The single most useful thing you can do
It is called modeling, or aided language stimulation, and it is the best-evidenced part of AAC practice. It means:
You press the words too, while you talk, without asking your child to copy.
When you say "shall we go outside?", press go and outside as you say it. When you say "that's finished", press all done. You are showing them what the board is for, in the same way you showed them what speech was for by speaking around them for years before they said anything.
Turn on 👩🏫 Modeling mode in the top bar while you do it, and your turns are logged separately so they are never mistaken for your child's own language. Aim for a couple of minutes a day. Ask nothing in return.
This feels strange for about a week and then it does not. It is the part that does the heavy lifting, and it is the part most families skip.
What every button does
💛 Not required — but it helps
EchoBridge costs you nothing and always will. There is no paid tier, nothing locked, and no feature you are missing by not giving. If money is tight — and for a lot of families with a disabled child it is — please just use the app. That is what it is for.
If you are able to give, the Amir Dean Foundation accepts donations, and they go toward reaching children who have no way to be understood yet.
💛 Ask how to donate 💬 Questions first
Giving changes nothing about your account, unlocks nothing, and is never asked for again inside the app. Please check the foundation's own page for its charitable status and whether a gift is tax-deductible where you live.
Building sentences
Tap words; they collect in the strip along the top; press SPEAK. One tap on its own says a whole thought — tapping happy alone says "I feel happy" — so a child who only ever presses one button is still saying something complete.
By default the app tidies the grammar when it speaks: want + go + park becomes "I want to go to the park." The strip always shows the words your child actually chose. If you or your therapist would rather hear exactly what was tapped, switch it off in settings under What the voice says.
Saying more than the present tense
Turn on Word forms in settings and a small ✎ appears on words that change. Tap it for wanted, wanting, will want, don't want, more than one, bigger. Without this a child can only ever speak in the present tense — they could never tell you what happened at school today.
Buddy, the conversation partner
Buddy is the face in the corner. It replies to what your child says, holds the topic across turns, asks a question now and then, and responds to the answer. Tap Buddy to have it start a conversation.
- Buddy never speaks for your child. It reflects, asks and offers.
- It asks one question at a time, then leaves a gap. Relentless questioning turns a conversation into an assessment.
- If a question goes unanswered, it lets it go. Not answering is allowed.
- Press 💬 to see the conversation written down. Seeing the shape of a back-and-forth helps children who are still learning that conversations have one.
- Buddy can be switched off completely in settings.
Teaching it your child's movements
This is the part no other communication app does. The camera can learn a movement your child already makes — a particular hand raise, a lean, a head turn — and give it a meaning.
- Open the dashboard → 📷 Movement and turn the camera on.
- Watch the movement meter for a few seconds. This tells you whether your child is in frame and lit well enough. Half of all setup problems show up right here.
- Press Teach a new movement and describe it the way you would to another adult: "raises left hand".
- Record about six examples. There is a countdown before each one. Your child will not do it identically twice, and that is exactly why six.
- Choose what it means, then press Test. The app tells you honestly how accurate it is, and warns you if two movements you have taught are too alike to tell apart.
Leave "speak it straight away" switched off unless you have tested a movement thoroughly. A recognized movement is a guess, and by default a guess is offered as a suggestion for a person to confirm rather than spoken as if your child had said it.
About the camera: no picture, frame or video is ever saved, sent or shown to anyone. Each frame is shrunk to a coarse smudge and immediately reduced to numbers describing how much motion happened in each of twelve squares. What gets stored is about 120 numbers per example. While the camera is on, a banner says so with a one-tap off.
Children who cannot touch the screen
Switch scanning is for children with cerebral palsy, Rett syndrome, or any motor difference that makes touching a screen unreliable. The board highlights things in turn, and your child presses a switch when it reaches what they mean.
- Most switches plug in as a keyboard and send Space or Enter.
- One switch: the highlight moves on a timer and the switch chooses.
- Two switches: one moves, one chooses. No time pressure at all — start here if you can.
- No switch at all? Turn on Movement acts as a switch and the camera becomes the switch. A child who can move their head can drive the whole board with no hardware to buy.
- Start the speed much slower than feels right. Speed up only once your child is visibly waiting for the highlight.
- HELP is always offered first, so a child in distress never has to wait out a full pass of the board.
Languages and voices
All fifteen languages are already inside EchoBridge. There is nothing to download, nothing to install, and no separate language pack to find — switching works even with no internet at all. Change it in Settings ⚙️ → Language, and all 575 words change with it.
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Hindi, Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba and Amharic. Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Dari lay the whole board out right-to-left automatically.
Settings → Language → “See all 15 languages” shows you a table of every one, whether it is loaded, and — the part that actually matters — whether this device has a voice that can speak it.
Two fixes: install a voice for that language in your device's own settings (Android: Settings → Languages → Text-to-speech; iPhone: Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices), or — often better — record your own voice for each word in the dashboard. Many children attend far more to a familiar voice than to any synthetic one.
Settings shows you which it is: under the Language box it says either which voice will be used, or that no voice is installed.
Making it theirs
- Photos beat symbols. A photo of your child's own cup usually means more than any drawing. Dashboard → Customize → 📷 on any word.
- Rename anything. If your family says "nana" rather than "grandma", change it.
- Add your own words. Your dog's name, a favorite show, the park you actually go to.
- Hide what gets in the way. Fewer choices is often better. Nothing is deleted.
- Record your voice for any word — 🎤 next to each one.
Growing the board
Settings → How much of the board to show has four levels: about 24 words, then 110, then 285, then all 575. They are strictly nested, so nothing your child has already learned ever disappears.
Level 1 puts every word on one screen with no navigation at all, and those 24 words are chosen to give a child control — want, stop, more, help, my turn, break — rather than to label nouns at them.
Change levels at a calm moment, and show your child the new board. Adding words moves buttons around, and a board that changes under a child's finger costs them the muscle memory they have built.
What the dashboard tells you
Everything on it is worked out on your own device from your own child's use. The most useful page is Language growth → Why they are communicating.
If almost everything is requesting, that is very common and not a problem in itself — but children who also comment, protest, greet and ask questions develop far more flexible language. The way in is modeling comments during play, with nothing asked in return.
If refusing appears, that is good news. Being able to say no, stop, and I do not like this is a protective skill and a real milestone. Honouring refusals immediately is what keeps it growing.
Sharing it with school
- Dashboard → Data & privacy → Export. You get one file.
- Send it to school. They open EchoBridge, choose Import, and now have the identical board — same words, same photos, same names.
- Print picture cards (🖨️) for the times a screen is not practical. Paper never runs out of battery.
A child whose board is different at home and at school has to learn two systems. Keeping them identical is worth the five minutes.
Accounts, and sharing a device with other adults
Open Settings ⚙️ → Account & people, or the same button on the dashboard. There you can change your own name, the email you sign in with, and your password.
The first person to set up a device owns it. The owner, and anyone they make an Administrator, can add other adults who use that same device — a second parent, a teaching assistant, a therapist — and can rename them, change what they are allowed to do, set a new password for somebody locked out, or remove them.
There are three levels. A Caregiver uses the boards and manages their own account. An Administrator can also manage everyone else on the device. The Owner is the one person who cannot be removed. If you are handing the device on — to a new class teacher, say — use “Role” on their name and choose owner.
EchoBridge will not let you strip the last administrator of their rights, or remove the owner. That is deliberate: a device a family cannot get back into is a child who cannot be understood.
Every change made here is written to an activity log on the same device, so you can see who added or removed whom. Administrators can read and export it from the Activity log tab.
When something is not working
Open Check this device first. It tests everything and usually names the cause in one line.
- Nothing is spoken. Check the device is not on silent, check ⏸️ Pause is off, and check a voice exists for your chosen language.
- Changing the language does nothing. Almost always the language files did not upload to the server. The check page will say so precisely.
- An old version keeps appearing. The app caches itself so it can work offline. Check this device → Clear the offline cache and reload. Your child's board is not touched.
- The camera will not start. The site must be on HTTPS, and the browser needs permission — click the padlock in the address bar → Site settings → Camera → Allow.
- Buttons are pressed by accident. Settings → Access → Hold a button to choose it.
- Your child keeps landing in settings. Settings → Lock the board. They keep every word, every phrase and HELP; only the grown-up controls disappear. Hold 🔒 for three seconds to unlock.
What to expect, honestly
Progress in AAC is measured in months, not days. A realistic first year looks something like: a few weeks of pressing things to see what happens, then requesting, then refusing, then — much later, and this is the big one — commenting on the world for no reason other than to share it with you.
Some children take much longer, and some never use many words, and both of those are still success if the child can tell someone they are in pain, or frightened, or that they want to be left alone.
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