OpenMic scores every syllable you produce through the PAD framework — Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance — measuring pre-articulatory instability in real time, before the block happens. In any browser.
A browser-based speech fluency console. OpenMic listens through your microphone, scores every syllable using the PAD acoustic engine, and shows what's happening in your speech — in real time, session over session.
Blocks, prolongations, and repetitions detected from the audio signal — not self-report. Every syllable scored for acoustic stability.
Practice any text. Words advance as you speak. PAD scoring runs in parallel on every word.
Session history, trend lines, and per-word Pressure maps that update every session.
Your camera stays on while you speak so you can watch your own delivery in real time.
Powered by Azure Cognitive Services. Supports all Azure-compatible languages.
PAD is FluentPlay's patent-pending per-syllable scoring framework, grounded in the neuropsychological model of Pleasure / Arousal / Dominance — originally formulated by James Russell to describe emotional and physiological states. FluentPlay maps these three dimensions directly onto the pre-articulatory planning window: the moment before a speaker's mouth moves, when stuttering actually begins.
The PAD engine is Predictive — it anticipates instability sites from session history. Adaptive — it calibrates to the individual speaker's baseline. Detection-based — it identifies disfluency events from acoustic features, not self-report. The acronym does both things at once: it names the inputs and describes what the engine does with them.
U.S. Provisional 64/016,001 · Filed March 24, 2026A speaker's historical comfort or discomfort with a specific word. Not phonetic complexity — neural history. A word attempted hundreds of times with a stutter carries a conditioned threat signal that a novel word doesn't. Pleasure scores low when that history is heavy; it rises as the word becomes safer across sessions.
The urgency to deliver a word within an environmental timing window — a question, a pause, a conversational beat. Arousal reflects how much time pressure the speaker perceives relative to the cue. High Arousal compresses the pre-articulatory planning window and directly disrupts motor timing stability.
The articulatory region — lips, tongue, glottis, velum — that carries the speaker's highest conditioned misfire load. Years of disfluency events wire specific muscle groups to respond with tension and over-contraction. Dominance scores the challenge at that exact anatomical site entering each syllable.
Each session starts at a stability floor derived from the speaker's calibrated baseline. Stutter events — blocks, prolongations, repetitions — cost points against that floor, weighted by syllable count. Session PAD is the floor minus cumulative event cost, bounded at zero.
Higher is more stable. Sessions are comparable across time for the same speaker.
Each session produces a six-axis PAD profile — Pressure Reduction, Anxiety Reduction, Ground Strength, Fluency Rate, Session Consistency, and Phoneme Range. Stacked across sessions, the shape shows longitudinal trajectory. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.
Eight voice-driven practice modes, all running on PAD scoring. Each targets a different aspect of speech-motor control. Microphone and browser only — no downloads.
Choose a phrase. Press the mic. Speak naturally. Syllable blobs light up in real time — blue for soft, green for medium, orange for loud. Your PAD score shows after each round. Difficulty adjusts automatically.
Easy onset and prolonged speech are among the most widely used fluency shaping techniques. Rainbow Syllables operationalizes these by requiring sustained, controlled voicing across an entire phrase.
Phrase-level production exercises the full basal ganglia–thalamocortical loop. Each syllable requires the putamen to gate the next motor plan in sequence.
Two sounds appear on screen. Say both without breaking your voice between them. 28 sound pairs across four difficulty levels. Start easy, work up.
Continuous phonation and coarticulation drills are standard in fluency therapy. Sound Bridge isolates the exact moment where voicing breaks down — the transition between two sounds.
Coarticulation is controlled by the premotor cortex. Sound Bridge directly trains feedforward control described in the DIVA model of speech production.
Type your scariest word. Hit start. Say it. Say it again. Watch your Pressure score drop and the climber rise with each repetition. The word that felt impossible becomes the word you've said fifty times.
Avoidance reduction therapy (Sheehan) and voluntary stuttering (Van Riper) are foundational. Summit applies structured exposure — confront feared words through repetition until the emotional charge diminishes.
Word-specific fear activates the amygdala, which modulates the basal ganglia gating system. Repeated voluntary production reduces the amygdala's threat response, stabilizing downstream motor gating.
Pick a word from the bank or type your own. Tap Speak and say it naturally. Each sound slot lights up in sequence — blue means it passed, red means it detected repeated attempts or high effort. Aim for all green. Less effort = better score.
Effort monitoring and proprioceptive awareness are core to fluency shaping. Articulation Trainer makes effort visible — showing which articulators are over-engaged and teaching minimal-pressure production.
Stuttering blocks involve excessive co-contraction of antagonist muscles at the articulatory level. Per-phoneme effort visualization provides biofeedback on motor overflow patterns that traditional therapy relies on clinician observation to detect.
Pads appear with a target volume zone. Make a sound and land in the zone. Green = nailed it. Difficulty increases as you improve. Three modes: hold, alternate, and burst.
Motor learning principles — specificity of practice, distributed practice, variable practice. Rhythm Pad trains proprioceptive control through volume targeting.
Volume regulation targets the M1 orofacial region and cerebellar-cortical coordination for sound intensity mapping.
Watch the beat indicator. When it hits the zone, make your sound. Start slow, speed up. The game scores how close you land to each beat.
Rhythmic cueing is used clinically to externalize the timing signal that the basal ganglia typically provides internally — reducing the system's dependence on a disrupted internal clock.
External rhythm engages the supplementary motor area via the cerebellum, providing an alternative timing pathway when the basal ganglia–SMA loop is dysregulated.
Watch bubbles move in wave patterns. When one enters the green zone, make a sound at the right volume. Miss the zone and it floats away. Speed changes as you level up.
Dual-task practice — producing controlled speech while tracking a moving target — trains attention resource management, building resilience against the cognitive load that exacerbates disfluency in real conversation.
Simultaneous visuomotor tracking and vocal output engages prefrontal executive control alongside the speech-motor circuit, training the system to perform under divided attention.
Stuttering changes in the time between sessions — not just during them. OpenMic gives your clients an independent practice tool and gives you the session data to see what changed.
Share OpenMic with clients. Review per-syllable session data, trend lines, and challenge-word Pressure maps between appointments.
Session-over-session PAD scores, disfluency event logs, and per-word history. Data export in CSV.
Integrating the PAD engine inside your platform or product? B2B licensing and white-label arrangements available. Contact for scope and pricing.
Protocol FP-PILOT-001 · IRB track active. Contact for research partnership inquiries.
Full four-level resolution breakdown — session, word, syllable, phoneme — with the complete OpenMic signal record. For clinical and technical partners.
View capabilities deck ↗Research by Per Alm and others locates the neurological origin of stuttering in the basal ganglia–SMA timing loop — not at articulation, but in pre-articulatory motor planning. The motor plan fails before the mouth moves.
Most speech therapy tools measure at or after articulation. PAD — grounded in Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance — targets the pre-articulatory window acoustically, treating voice onset time and formant stability as proxies for what happened upstream in the planning circuit.
PAD targets instability at the Pre-SMA → SMA gate.
Phonetic complexity doesn't predict stuttering frequency. Word-specific neural history does. A simple word spoken hundreds of times with a stutter carries a conditioned motor planning burden that a complex novel word doesn't.
OpenMic tracks per-word Pressure across sessions. The Pressure map shows which words are stabilizing — and which aren't.
FluentPlay is in initial discussions with NIRx about developing a wearable fNIRS protocol for pre-SMA hemodynamic monitoring during speech planning tasks.
No active protocol is underway. If this work proceeds, PAD scores will be compared against fNIRS-measured pre-SMA activation, with the goal of validating PAD as a non-invasive proxy for a neural biomarker — which would enable clinical trial endpoints without neuroimaging infrastructure.
Every game shares the same audio engine. The microphone feeds a real-time analysis pipeline — approximately 60 frames per second — classified into a disfluency feature stream that feeds the PAD scorer. No audio is recorded. Nothing leaves the browser except one cloud call for phoneme-level accuracy via Azure.
View pipeline walkthrough ↗FluentPlay is HIPAA-compliant by architecture. No personally identifiable or protected health information is created, collected, or stored at any layer. Audio is processed in real time through Azure Cognitive Services with no retention. No accounts or identifiers are required to use OpenMic.
Protocol FP-PILOT-001 · IRB track active. Research partnership inquiries welcome — contact below.
Will Carbone is the founder of FluentPlay Technologies. He's stuttered since childhood. Before FluentPlay, he spent more than a decade inside clinical and commercial biotech — building, monitoring, and stress-testing the systems that take drug molecules from synthesis to verified purity. Extraction, purification, analytical measurement, quality control from bench to commercial scale. The discipline of making invisible things legible through rigorous data.
When he looked at what existed for people who stutter, he found tools that hadn't kept pace with the neuroscience. The research was clear: stuttering is a timing problem rooted in pre-articulatory motor planning. The tools treated it as something else.
He left biotech and built the measurement instrument the field was missing.
Protocol FP-PILOT-001 · IRB track active.
Contact for research partnership inquiries.
PAD Engine licensing, white-label deployments, and enterprise agreements handled directly. No RFPs — just a conversation.