Vaak

Vaak is a free, offline-first AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) app. It helps anyone who needs support with spoken communication — people who are non-speaking, partially speaking, or who lose their voice to illness or injury — build phrases by tapping symbols and hear those phrases spoken aloud in natural, expressive voices. No account, no subscription, no ads, no internet connection required after install. Who Vaak is for • Children with autism, apraxia of speech, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, or developmental speech delays • Adults with ALS, aphasia, stroke recovery, Parkinson's, or temporary voice loss after surgery • Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and special-education teachers building communication boards for clients and students • Parents, caregivers, and family members supporting a loved one • Anyone who needs a reliable voice on a difficult day What's inside • Four natural voices ship bundled in the app: one adult man, one adult woman, one boy, and one girl. Every combination of age and gender is available immediately on first launch — no extra downloads, no accounts, no server dependency. Voices are generated on-device by Piper, a neural text-to-speech engine that sounds significantly more human than classic TTS. • Thousands of pictographic symbols from ARASAAC, the open AAC symbol library created by Sergio Palao for the Government of Aragón. Symbols are bundled with the app. • Build phrases by tapping symbols: each tap speaks the word, and a sentence bar collects your words so the full message can be played back with one press. • Create your own boards, rearrange buttons, swap in personal photos, and pick any grid size — from a 2×2 starter board up to dense grids for fluent communicators. • Standard OBF and OBZ import/export means boards you build in Vaak are compatible with the wider AAC ecosystem, and boards you receive from a therapist open in Vaak without reformatting. • Row/column scanning for users with limited motor control, switch-driven or timed. • Haptic feedback on every tap for users who rely on tactile confirmation. • Multiple visual themes including high-contrast and sensory-friendly palettes. • Optional PIN lock on the editor so users can't accidentally modify boards while using the app. Privacy is not an afterthought Vaak stores everything on your device only. No account to create. No cloud sync. No analytics. No crash reporting. No ads. No advertising IDs. No tracking SDKs. Uninstalling the app removes every board, phrase, custom photo, voice preference, and PIN hash — there is no server holding a copy. The only time Vaak touches the internet is if you explicitly use the online ARASAAC search in editor mode to pull additional symbols; your search terms are sent to ARASAAC's public API and nothing else. Full policy at https://vaak-privacy.pages.dev/ Built in the open Vaak is a solo project, released free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Source code is on GitHub at github.com/chiragypatil/Vaak. It is built on Flutter, Drift, sherpa-onnx, and Piper voice models — all open source. Complete third-party credits are listed in Settings → About. This app exists because commercial AAC software is expensive, often ad-supported or subscription-based, and usually requires a cloud account. The people who need AAC most — children in underserved schools, adults on fixed incomes, families supporting someone with a new diagnosis — shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee or hand over data to speak. If Vaak helps someone in your life find their voice, that is the whole goal.