Your child’s speech sounds, practised properly at home.

Most English-speaking children produce R accurately by around age 6. Before about 4½, R errors are common and usually developmental. If your child is 6 or older and still substituting R — most often saying “w” for “r” — that is the point at which it is worth having a speech-language pathologist take a look. Our free check compares your child’s age against published norms for each sound and tells you which side of that line they are on.

Substituting W for R is the single most common articulation error in English-speaking children. The R sound needs the tongue to curl up or bunch back while the lips stay relaxed; W needs rounded lips and no tongue elevation. Children who have not yet learned the R tongue shape default to the easier lip movement. It usually resolves with age, and when it does not, targeted practice on tongue placement is the standard approach.

No, and any app that says otherwise should be treated with suspicion. A speech-language pathologist assesses, diagnoses, and adapts in real time — software cannot do that. What software is genuinely good at is the part therapy depends on and rarely gets: consistent, correctly ordered daily repetition between sessions. My Talking Friend is built for that role, and it screens for warning signs that should send you to a clinician instead.

No — deliberately. Speech recognition is substantially less accurate on children’s voices than on adults’, and less accurate again on speech that is disordered, which is exactly the case here. An app that wrongly tells a child “correct” is teaching the error. In My Talking Friend the parent marks each attempt as correct, not quite, or unsure, and recordings are archived so you can judge change over time with your own ears.

Longer than most parents expect, and the reason is structural: English R is not a single target but roughly eighteen distinct contexts, each with its own tongue shape. Progress is usually quick at the isolation and word stages and slow at the carryover stage, where the sound has to survive into ordinary conversation. Measured in months rather than weeks is normal, and consistency of daily practice matters more than session length.

R, S, L, TH, K and G, and SH, CH and J — the speech sounds that account for the large majority of articulation referrals in English. Each is broken into its own contexts by position in the word, and each context is practised through seven levels from isolation to everyday conversation.

Recordings exist so that you can hear your child’s progress over time. They are stored on our own infrastructure, are not sold, and are not handed to third-party advertising or model-training vendors. You can delete every recording for a child profile in one action. The app carries no advertising of any kind.

Not in the practice programme, and that is a safety decision rather than a gap. Fluency disorders can be made worse by the wrong kind of well-meant intervention at home, so stuttering is something our check screens for and refers on, with plain guidance for parents while you arrange to see someone.