Brief Report: A Mobile Application to Treat Prosodic Deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Other Communication Impairments: A Pilot Study.

Schoen’s team gave eight children with autism a tablet app called SpeechPrompts.

The app shows a face, plays a sentence, then records the child copying the pitch and rhythm.

Kids used it five minutes a day, three days a week, for eight weeks in speech class.

Two speech therapists rated prosody before and after listening to 30-second voice clips.

After eight weeks, average prosody scores moved from "poor" to "fair."

Every child stayed engaged; no one asked to quit.

Gains were small but visible—voices sounded less flat or sing-song.

Efstratopoulou et al. (2023) saw a similar boost when kids used Dragon speech-to-text for writing.

Both studies used short, low-dose tech in class and saw small communication wins.

Slater et al. (2020) found that 25 hours of full ABA beats 15 hours only for mild autism.

That looks like a clash—little app, big dose—but Paul studied toddlers getting full therapy, while Schoen tested a quick add-on for school-age kids.

Han et al. (2025) meta-analysis says high-intensity ABA gives medium language gains.

Schoen’s tiny dose still helped, showing apps can squeeze extra practice into busy days.

You don’t need more hours in the day—just five-minute fillers that keep kids working on prosody while you take data or set up the next task.

SpeechPrompts is cheap, needs no extra staff, and kids like it.

Try it as a warm-up or exit ticket; keep measuring voice clips to see if it helps your students too.