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Augmentative and alternative communication is a compilation of methods and technology designed to supplement spoken communication for people with limited speech or language skills, including children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The field of AAC has evolved rapidly within the last 10 years, due to a combination of empirical advances from research as well as rapid changes in technology. This article reviews some of the most significant aspects of this growth as it relates to children with developmental disabilities. Major issues within the field, the evidence base available to practitioners and researchers, and promising areas of future growth are identified.

People with complex communication needs who use speech-generating devices have very little expressive control over their tone of voice. Despite its importance in human interaction, the issue of tone of voice remains all but absent from AAC research and development however. In this paper, we describe three interdisciplinary projects, past, present and future: The critical design collection Six Speaking Chairs has provoked deeper discussion and inspired a social model of tone of voice; the speculative concept Speech Hedge illustrates challenges and opportunities in designing more expressive user interfaces; the pilot project Tonetable could enable participatory research and seed a research network around tone of voice. We speculate that more radical interactions might expand frontiers of AAC and disrupt speech technology as a whole.

As speech synthesis technology develops more advanced paralinguistic capabilities, open questions emerge regarding how humans perceive the use of such vocal capabilities by robots. Perceptions of spoken interaction are complex and influenced by multiple factors including the linguistic content of a message, social context, perceived intelligence of the agent, and form factor of its embodiment. This paper shares results from a study that controlled for the above factors in order to investigate the effect on human listeners of a male synthetic voice with an expressive range. Participants were randomly assigned to three conditions, counterbalancing for gender and language background, in which how paralinguistic cues were applied was varied. As the voice became more expressive and appropriate for the context, observers were more likely to describe the communication as effective, but were less likely to refer to the unseen agent as a person. Possible effects of the listener gender and culturallinguistic background are examined. Implications for future methodologies in this field are discussed.