About us

About us

Soundbyte Solutions was formed in 1995 by husband and wife team, Russell and Julia Jepson. The company is based in Dorset, UK.

The aim of the business is to design and manufacture innovative electronic products focusing on audiological health care.

Our first product was the Parrot speech discrimination tester. Originally available only with the McCormick Toy Test, it soon became clear that alternative tests and customisation options would be required. English as an Alternative Language and Manchester Picture Test handsets soon followed, with Manchester Junior Word Lists and AB Short Word Lists following some time later.

As the business has grown, we have responded to our customers demands for alternative word lists, customisation options, and a speech test development service.

The Parrot is used in over 350 Audiological Centres within the UK and Ireland, and is being used with a native speaker recording in Australia.

In 2003 we launched the Phoenix automated speech tester. The Phoenix combined research conducted by the Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham with the proven digital speech reproduction technology used in the Parrot. The Phoenix allowed audiologists to conduct speech testing in background noise to produce a meaningful hearing threshold. There are now more than 80 Phoenix devices in use throughout the UK and Ireland.

In November 2008, we launched the Parrotplus. This was a completely new design bringing multiple speech tests within a single handset. We were also able to add the facility to perform any of the tests with background noise. Currently the Parrotplus can perform the McCormick Toy Test, the English as an  Alternative Language test, the Manchester Picture Test, the  Manchester Junior Word Lists and AB Short Word Lists as well as the Chear Auditory Performance Test and Chear Consonant Confusion Test. In June 2010, we added the Ling 6 test to the Parrotplus.