About SentenceShaper and how to use it

This section of the website explains SentenceShaper™, the software we have developed to help people with aphasia communicate. It also explains how to download the software or order it by mail, and how to purchase it.

Here are the contents of this section:

• A detailed description of how SentenceShaper works (lower down on this page).
• SentenceShaper FAQS (Frequently Asked Questions)
• What others are saying about the software
• Requirements for a computer to run SentenceShaper
• Quick Start instructions for using the program once it's installed: page 1 and page 2
• How to download SentenceShaper and its manuals over the internet
• How to buy SentenceShaper and what it costs
• How to activate the software on a computer (This page also explains what activation is and why it's needed.)
• How to get SentenceShaper and the manuals if you can't download them We can mail them to you.

We've done our best to make this all very clear, but please do contact us if you have any questions!

How SentenceShaper works

To record a word or phrase on the system, you would use the "On" and "Off" buttons, shown here, to turn the computer's sound recorder on and off. (You will need to be using a microphone in order to record your speech.)

Whatever you say while the sound recorder is on gets recorded by the program; then a "shape", a small crystal ball like one of these shown below appears on the screen immediately.

If you click on the shape, it plays back the chunk that was just recorded. As you record different chunks, the crystal balls that show up on the screen have one or another of the designs shown above, so you can tell them apart visually.

These shapes can be dragged up to another part of the screen (the "Sentence Assembly Area" - see screen shot below) to be ordered (from left to right) into sentences.

You can play back the entire sequence of shapes in this area in order to correct errors or to help yourself think of new words. Shapes can also be put into a different order in this Sentence Assembly Area, by moving them to different slots.

When you are satisfied with your sentence, you click a button to have the entire sequence moved up to another part of the screen, the "Narrative Assembly Area", where it is now represented by a single icon (which looks like a purple bean, shown here on the right).

A purple bean can be moved back from the Narrative Area to the Sentence Area, where it decomposes back into the individual shapes, which can be replaced, re-ordered, or combined with new material. An entire narrative (the ordered sequence of purple beans) can be built up in this way. As the sound files are .mp3 files, they can be emailed to family or friends, or used in many other ways.

In this screen shot of SentenceShaper, the On/Off recording buttons are at the bottom, in the center of the row.  The white arrow pointing left is how you exit the program, and the question mark takes you to additional words.

SentenceShaper was designed to have a very simple interface with as little distraction as possible. For that reason, it actually covers the toolbar that usually appears at the bottom of the screen on Windows computers. For the same reason, it doesn't have the usual three little boxes in the upper right corner of the screen. To exit the program, you use that arrow at the bottom left.

For step-by-step guidance in using the software program the first time, or just to get a better sense of how it works, see our Quickstart Guide, page 1 and page 2.