Turning speech therapy into child’s play
How Associate Professor Beena Ahmed turned kids’ screen time into therapy time
Published on the 05 August 2026
When it comes to fixing a child’s speech disorder, it’s a numbers game. To fix something like the commonly mispronounced ‘wabbit’ rather than ‘rabbit’, a child will typically practice the relevant speech exercise hundreds of times.
Progress is relatively easy to achieve in one-on-one sessions with a pathologist but maintaining that momentum at home is a major hurdle. For busy parents, speech practice often becomes another forgotten chore.
It was this frustration that led to the eventual development of SayBananas, a game that incorporates speech therapy exercises into a colourful, Mario-like experience by speech pathologist Professor Kirrie Ballard and 91ɫƬ Engineering’s Associate Professor Beena Ahmed.
A fascination with speech
A specialist in signal processing long fascinated by speech, A/Prof. Ahmed completed her PhD at 91ɫƬ before working overseas for more than a decade.
During her time abroad, a conversation with a speech pathologist friend highlighted the homework hurdle: children would excel in sessions but show little progress by their follow-up appointment.
“SayBananas was basically to tackle this issue, to try and motivate children and their parents as well, to support those children in doing their therapy exercises at home,” says A/Prof. Ahmed.
A/Prof. Ahmed and Prof. Ballard established Say66 to begin work on what would become SayBananas. The pair developed an assessment methodology that rewards the player’s correct pronunciation while simultaneously reporting their performance to their speech pathologist.
“I'm not the first one to think of using games to engage with children, but the two of us were the first ones to think about actually providing feedback in the games,” she says.
Nailing the fun factor
The gameplay development process was challenging. A/Prof. Ahmed did not have a background in gaming, and making the game fun to play took time.
“I think the biggest learning was that you shouldn't ask the speech therapist or speech pathologist what games a child likes to play. You should ask the children.”
Early game iterations resembled digital versions of classic speech pathology exercises, like matching pairs or images.
“Children did not like it one bit. It was boring,” says A/Prof. Ahmed. “They wanted something what was fast, interactive, whereas the speech pathologist wanted something that was slow, deliberate.”
SayBananas attempts to balance the engaging, responsive gameplay loop that players enjoyed with the emphasis on speech exercises that pathologists required. A 2D platformer, or ‘sidescroller’, players control a customisable monkey protagonist through a variety of colourful levels. The app is available on and tablets for free, with premium features available through in-app purchases.
Becoming a founder and developing SayBananas helped A/Prof. Ahmed appreciate the importance of real-world impact in engineering.
“It helps me understand when I’m proposing research projects, that perspective of the use case, what would be valuable to society,” she says. “It’s driving the message into the students that what makes a product successful is not how good it is, but how many people buy it.”
Incorporating speech disorder screening
For the next update to SayBananas, A/Prof. Ahmed is shifting her focus on speech issues further upstream. She is currently developing a screening tool, based on new research, that will identify speech disorders in children before they start school – the optimum age for treatment.
Currently, many Australian children go undiagnosed due to the cost of medical services and a shortage of speech pathologists. This delay is costly; the longer a disorder goes untreated, the more entrenched incorrect speech patterns become, making them far more difficult to resolve.
“The vision is to do it just before they start school, similar to tests for hearing and eyesight.”
Leading the conversation
A/Prof. Ahmed’s work will inform conversation at the speech technology and science conference , taking place in Sydney this September. As General Chair of the event, A/Prof. Ahmed views the conference as a rare opportunity for global researchers to collaborate locally.
Her hope is that the event will raise the profile of speech processing in Australia, especially as voice-activated technology becomes a staple of daily life through assistants like Siri and Alexa.
Media enquiries
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