Name That Thing
Sesla started as an AAC board — tap symbols, build sentences, hear them spoken. That's the core and it's not going anywhere. But aphasia therapy is more than just having a voice. One of the most common exercises a speech therapist will run is confrontation naming: show the patient a picture of an apple, and ask them to say "apple." Simple in concept. Brutal in practice when the word is sitting right there in your brain and your mouth won't cooperate.
185
Items in Deck
12
Categories
1403
Tests Passing
How it works
The naming tab lives inside Sesla's practice mode. You see an emoji (or a photo you added yourself), and you say its name into the mic. The app listens via speech-to-text, checks your answer with fuzzy matching, and either celebrates or nudges you to try again. If you're stuck, progressive hints kick in — first the starting sound, then the syllable breakdown, then the full word spoken aloud by the TTS voice. Each hint costs you a couple of points, but the goal isn't a high score. The goal is retrieval practice.
Sessions are 10 random items from the deck. Short enough that you can do one while waiting for coffee. At the end you get a results card you can share — mostly so a caregiver or therapist can see what the patient practiced today without hovering over their shoulder.
The deck
Building the item list was more fun than expected. The deck has 185 items across 12 categories: food, animals, household, clothing, nature, transport, body parts, sports, everyday objects, numbers, money, and traffic. Every item exists in both English and Turkish, with syllable hints and accepted aliases (so "TV" and "television" and "telly" all count).
Numbers turned out to be trickier than I expected. Single digits like 3 and 7 use keycap emoji and render fine. But multi-digit numbers — 176, 483, 1000 — don't have emoji equivalents that look right on a phone. Chaining keycap emoji (1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣) renders as four giant separate glyphs. The fix was a custom widget that renders multi-digit numbers as white text on a gradient circle, matching the visual weight of the emoji items.
Custom items
The built-in deck covers common everyday objects, but every patient's life is different. Maybe your dad's word-finding difficulty is specifically around the names of his grandchildren, or the tools in his workshop. So the app lets you add your own items — snap a photo, type the word, done. Custom items merge into the deck and show up in sessions alongside the built-in ones.
Custom items are stored as JSON files per deck with images saved locally. No cloud sync, no privacy concerns. The photos never leave the device.
The paywall question
This is always the hard part with a therapy app. You want the free tier to be genuinely useful — this isn't a game, it's a medical tool. But you also need the business to work so the app stays maintained.
The landing point: free users get one naming session per day. That's enough for daily practice, enough to see if it's helpful, and enough to build a habit. Practice Plus subscribers get unlimited sessions and the ability to add custom photo items. The quota chip at the top of the tab makes the limit visible without being obnoxious — green for unlimited, neutral for "0 / 1 today", and a gentle red when you've used your daily session with a tap to upgrade.
One detail I'm happy about: the quota uses the same 4am day boundary as the rest of the practice mode. If you're doing a late night session at 2am, it still counts as "today" rather than burning tomorrow's free session. Small thing, but it avoids a confusing edge case.
What's next
The naming exercise is live on both Android and iOS now. I want to watch how people actually use it before making big changes. The obvious future additions — difficulty filtering, progress tracking over time, therapist-curated decks — are all on the list, but I'd rather ship something simple that works and iterate than build features nobody asked for.
The test count crept up to 1403, and the per-day quota logic has its own test suite covering user isolation, day boundaries, the 4am rollover, and the minimum-session-size guard that prevents a degenerate 1-item deck from burning your daily free session. The kind of tests where you write them and think "nobody will ever hit this edge case" and then someone absolutely will.