When considering the creation of Apps to enter the children’s products market, Rosetta Stone® knew it needed a partner with an elite and specific set of skills. It needed a developer with a combination of technical and creative capacities. That developer needed excellent character design and creative direction skills, who could develop using the tools required for App development (in this case Unity). Rosetta Stone also had an ambitious desire to use voice recognition technology as a vehicle to get kids to use spoken language as an input for interaction, so their develop needed to be able to design games and handle technology well outside the usual suspects.
Rosetta Stone chose to develop with my firm, and I like to think that the results speak for themselves. Rosetta Stone Kids Lingo Letter Sounds, released in September 2013, combines charming character and environmental design, cutting edge speech technology, and excellent interactive design into a top flight whole. The app has garnered mention from high profile media, including The Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool, Forbes, Appolicious and many others. I provided character design, animation, animation direction, creative direction, design, instructional design, storyboards, prop design and concept ideation.
From reviews on the iTunes Store Page:
“This app is great! My 4 year old loves to learn Spanish and watch the cute little Lingos dance and jump around. I have a TON of apps and this is the first time seeing one that’s interactive with speaking! I can’t help but giggle when my son shouts out the words with such enthusiasm and he feels so accomplished when he’s “rewarded” by seeing the Lingos react. Happy kids make mommy happy too!”
“Wow! The voice recognition really works– kiddos use spoken spanish to interact with the characters. Very cool. Great animation as well!”
From Forbes.com
“Lingo Letter Sounds only makes slight use of Rosetta Stone’s excellent speech recognition. They use it for teaching basic Spanish phrases. And whatever they did to make it kid-friendly worked… I’m excited to see the apps Rosetta Stone builds as they flesh out this franchise of direct to consumer apps for kids. And I’m excited to discover if my kids learn spanish as we review each of the games.”
Check Out Rosetta Stone’s page marketing the app to the public: