Auris Tech built an automatic speech recognition engine that understands children as they read aloud, developed in partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. Its first product, the Fonetti app, listens while a child reads and gently helps them along. The founder’s reason for starting was blunt: at the end of every school year, 250,000 children leave education without being able to read properly.
When we met the team in September 2019, Auris was preparing to launch and to raise investment, and it needed a brand of its own. The brief was demanding. Auris had to look credible and technical without feeling sterile, sit behind the warm, playful Fonetti app as part of one family, and stretch to future uses of the engine beyond children, such as helping people recover their speech after a stroke.
We started with a Brandscape workshop with the Auris team. Together we mapped the people Auris had to win over, from editors and heads of digital at children’s publishers to online sales directors and the product owners who would build the engine into their own apps, and wrote down what each one feared, what frustrated them and what would win them over. Publishers worried about losing control of their revenue the way the music industry had. Product owners had been burned before, had no patience for suppliers who over-promise, and were put off by buzzwords. The brand promise that came out of it was world-class speech recognition that is easy to implement, in a voice the team summed up as experts with empathy, responsible but playful. The founder put the product most simply: “It doesn’t turn red. It doesn’t humiliate. It gently helps you learn.”
The design brief followed from there: show that Auris listens, understands and learns from speech, feel as technical and credible as “Siri meets ‘Intel inside’”, and come to life in motion and 3D. Our first round of concepts explored speech bubbles, brains, equalisers and soundwaves. The final mark draws a soundwave as one continuous rounded line, and its curves and angles carry through every part of the identity.
The identity pairs the soundwave mark with two gradients, magenta to orange and blue to teal, on a near-black base, with accent colours drawn from Fonetti so the two brands read as one family. The logo’s curves become patterns, waveform dividers and image masks that frame photography of children reading. We set it all out in brand guidelines, version 1.0 in November 2019, covering the logo, colour, type, graphic assets, imagery, iconography, stationery, presentation decks, banner ads, social media and web.
Then we put it to work across a logo suite, a 3D render and animated logo ident, business cards, letterheads and compliment slips, email signatures, a presentation template, social media headers and a holding page for the website, which introduced Auris as innovators of the world’s first ASR engine for children’s read speech. For apps built on the engine we created an “Empowered by Auris” signature, which works the way “Intel Inside” does, so Fonetti, and any product that follows, credits the technology behind it.
Our handover to the Auris team also included work for the Fonetti iPad app itself: screens and exported assets for moments such as choosing who is reading in an underwater scene, picking a character from an avatar carousel and, once a book is finished, telling the app how it made you feel with a row of faces. Alongside them sat a set of menu icons and an animated loading sequence for the app.
Outfly, a London brand, marketing and product agency. We ran the Brandscape workshop and created the Auris soundwave identity, brand guidelines, stationery, social headers, website holding page and logo animation, along with the “Empowered by Auris” signature for its apps.
A reading app for children from Auris Tech. It uses Auris speech recognition to listen as a child reads aloud and gently help them along, and it carries an “Empowered by Auris” signature.
Give it a credible identity of its own, then link the two. Auris got a soundwave mark and a grown-up, technical look, with accent colours taken from Fonetti, plus an “Empowered by Auris” signature that works like “Intel Inside” on every app built on the engine.
Children who struggle to read. Its founder started from the fact that 250,000 children leave education each year without being able to read properly, and built technology that helps them read aloud without judgement.
