Each game listens to your speech through the microphone and responds in real time. You don't type or tap — you talk. The games personalize to your speech patterns, target your hardest sounds, and track your progress session by session.
Every time you speak, FluentPlay gives you a score on four things. These help the games adapt to you and show your progress over time.
Choose a phrase. Press the mic. Speak naturally. Syllable blobs light up in real time. 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.
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.
Pads appear with a target volume zone. Make a sound and land in the zone. Green = nailed it. Difficulty increases as you improve.
Motor learning principles — specificity of practice, distributed practice, and variable practice. Rhythm Pad trains proprioceptive control (hitting volume targets).
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.
Watch bubbles move. 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.
Six games are live now with early-access partners. Drop your email to request access.
If your child stutters, FluentPlay works in any web browser — no downloads, no special equipment, just a microphone. Your child picks their own words. The difficulty adjusts automatically. And the scores show what's getting easier, session by session.
Assign games to your clients. Review per-syllable analytics. See which words are improving and which are stuck. FluentPlay extends your work into the space between sessions — where stuttering actually changes.
Will Carbone is the founder of FluentPlay Technologies. He's stuttered since childhood. He came from synthetic mRNA manufacturing — process development, tech transfer, production science. When he looked at what existed for people who stutter, he found tools that hadn't evolved in decades. The research was clear that stuttering is a timing problem. The tools ignored it. He left biotech and built the tools himself.
Have a question? Want to try the games? Looking for tools for your child or client?
The part of the brain that plans speech sends signals that are mistimed or unstable. FluentPlay tracks how speech is produced, syllable by syllable, and shows where the timing breaks down.
Technical: the speech-motor circuit — from phonological encoding in the IFG to motor gating in the putamen to execution at M1 — breaks down at specific points. FluentPlay's PAD framework monitors those breakdowns in real time.
Each game targets a different part of this circuit.
FluentPlay models stuttering as predictable instability in speech-motor timing during pre-articulatory planning — not at articulation onset. The breakdown happens before your mouth moves. Every factor is measurable and trainable.
Pressure isn't about phonetic complexity. It's about how much neural load a specific word carries for you, based on your history with it.
A word like "cat" is phonetically simple — one syllable, common consonants. But if you've stuttered on "cat" hundreds of times, your brain has hardened a cortisol-linked stress response around that exact motor sequence. The pre-SMA fires the plan, but the basal ganglia gates it with accumulated hesitation.
Pressure is measured per syllable through voice onset time, formant stability, and F0 variability.
Anxiety is the tension that fires between knowing what you want to say and saying it. The amygdala detects the feared word approaching and may trigger a stress response before the motor plan even reaches execution.
This isn't general nervousness — it's word-specific anticipatory tension. You can be completely relaxed and still feel a spike of dread when you see a specific sound coming.
Anxiety is independent of Pressure but amplifies it. A high-Pressure word with low Anxiety may flow fine. Add the anticipatory stress response and the gate misfires.
Disfluency isn't a score you control — it's a signal that emerges. It's the product of Pressure and Anxiety interacting, not the sum. This distinction matters.
If Pressure is 5 and Anxiety is 2, the output isn't 7 — it's 10. If Pressure is 20 and Anxiety is 20, the output isn't 40 — it's 400. The multiplicative relationship means that reducing either factor dramatically reduces the output.
This is why exposure therapy works on Pressure while real-time feedback stabilizes both.
Ground measures whether your system is settling or accumulating strain across a session. It tracks the trajectory — are Pressure and Anxiety trending down, or building up?
A rising Ground score means the speech-motor system is stabilizing. A falling Ground score means strain may be accumulating — you may need to step back or take a break.
Ground tells you whether training is working — not on a single word, but across the whole session.
Pressure and Anxiety are independent inputs. Disfluency emerges from their interaction — it's multiplicative, not additive. Ground measures whether your system is settling or accumulating strain.
Research suggests that repeated disfluency events may condition a stress response — including cortisol release — around specific motor sequences. FluentPlay's games are designed around this model.
Phonetic complexity doesn't predict stuttering. Neural history does. Tap each word to see the difference.
Select a word below to see where the circuit breaks
Select a word above to see why its PAD scores look the way they do — and where the signal breaks down in the speech-motor circuit.
Every syllable is analyzed in real time. The scoring engine extracts features and maps them to PAD scores.
Voice onset time · Formant trajectories (F1, F2) · F0 variability · Amplitude contour · Spectral tilt · Jitter & shimmer · Pre-speech silence · Restart patterns
Rainbow Syllables — voicing smoothness across phrases
Sound Bridge — voicing continuity at boundaries
Summit — Pressure attenuation across reps
Rhythm Pad — volume accuracy
Cadence — temporal alignment
Bubble Hunt — amplitude + timing under load
In collaboration with NIRx, FluentPlay is developing a wearable fNIRS protocol to measure cortical activation during speech planning.
1. PAD scoring → 2. fNIRS capture (pre-SMA) → 3. Correlation → 4. Biomarker validation
If validated, PAD scores become a non-invasive proxy for a neural biomarker — clinical trial endpoints without imaging.
Every session updates your personal Pressure map. Which words are getting easier. Which are stuck. How your baseline is shifting.
Per-target Pressure trends · Session comparisons · Ground baseline trajectory · Challenge word progress · Data export (CSV, JSON)
Clinicians assign games, review per-syllable analytics, adjust difficulty, and track progress between sessions. The tools extend clinical practice into the spaces where stuttering actually changes.