This is a series of product introductions that were Finalist at the 2016 BabyTechAward. The winner of the best learning product for babies is Starling.
The idea is to make education fun by counting how many words your child hears each day and using more words to talk to them, based on research that shows how many words (vocabulary) they have heard by the age of four can affect their later acquisition of conversation and vocabulary! It's a fun way to educate your child. The world's first wearable word measuring device - this is the key concept behind Starling.
How to use Starling
Starling puts a star-shaped wearable device on your baby. It's a batch of stars in the shape of a star. Then all you have to do is turn it on and talk to your baby.
How does it parse words?
Versame, the company that runs Starling, has written a summary of how Starling's speech analysis works. It's an interesting approach.
It converts the words you speak orally into speech signals. However, since speech signals are nothing but sound waves, they do not have a format like words. It requires ingenuity to analyze them. Also, the shape of the sound wave varies depending on the size of the voice, so Starling has installed a sound wave analysis engine in its smartphone app, which performs sound wave analysis in real time as long as the wearable device is connected via Wifi. So Starling's know-how lies in its ability to extract highly accurate words from spoken language through sonic analysis.
The Starling Pack (device and charger) is available for $199. It's a buy-one-get-one-free deal, and the app is available for free. iOS 9 and above are supported only; Android is in beta. 4.4 (Kitkat) and above are supported.
User Reviews
The review is registered in Launchpad of Amazon.com. The fact that all of the reviews are 5 stars is a bit of a steal, but since the only function is to tally up the number of words you've spoken to your baby, it's probably just a product that people clearly like and dislike.
