Let People Build Their Own AAC Tools: Inside "Do-It-Yourself AAC" 💪🔨👷♂️
Most AI-powered AAC research so far has followed the same basic shape: researchers build a tool, hand it to people with communication disabilities, and see what they think. A new CHI '26 paper out of the University of Maryland flips that model entirely. Instead of asking "does our AI tool help you?" it asks a more radical question: "can we give you the raw AI building blocks and let you build your own?"
The paper — Do-It-Yourself AAC: Co-Designing User-Programmable AI Communication Tools with People with Aphasia, by Jong Ho Lee and Stephanie Valencia — tackles a problem that's been quietly underneath almost every AAC story we've covered this year: generic tools built for the average user tend to miss the specific user. Aphasia, a language disorder that affects roughly two million people in the U.S. alone, is a condition where "the average user" barely exists — severity, symptoms, and communication needs vary enormously from person to person. AAC technology, the researchers argue, is often difficult to customize and can overlook exactly the personal needs that matter most.
Their proposed fix borrows an idea from software development rather than speech-language pathology: end-user programming — giving the person who needs the tool the ability to build and modify it themselves, rather than waiting for a developer to anticipate their needs.
The study: two parts, eight participants, and a box of physical blocks
The researchers ran a two-part study with eight participants with aphasia.
Part one was a card-sorting exercise. Participants were given cards representing different AI functions and asked to sort them by how useful each would be for a conversation scenario they picked themselves. One clear signal came out immediately: participants consistently valued AI's ability to predict words and full sentences from brief or incomplete input — in other words, the AI's job was to fill in the gaps that aphasia creates, not to replace the person's intent.
Part two is where the paper gets genuinely novel. In in-person co-design workshops, participants built hypothetical communication tools using tangible, physical code blocks — not software, actual objects they could pick up, connect, and rearrange. Each block represented a single AI function or data operation, and its physical shape told you something about it: a triangular edge meant the block handled text, a square edge meant it handled images, and green blocks marked the end of a program. Participants snapped these blocks together into little programs matched to real communication situations from their own lives.
The reasoning behind this design choice is the heart of the paper: formulating a request in natural language — the normal way you'd ask a developer for a feature, or type a prompt into an AI chatbot — can itself be a barrier for someone with aphasia. Tangible blocks sidestepped that barrier entirely. Instead of describing what they wanted in words, participants could show it, piece by piece.
What happened when people with aphasia got to build their own tools
The results were encouraging on the central question: every participant who took part in the workshops was able to successfully assemble multiple working hypothetical programs. They could correctly identify what kind of data a block took in and put out, and combine blocks into sequences that matched their intended scenario. A few participants needed time to get comfortable with the mechanics at first — but all of them got there.
What's most striking isn't just that it worked, but how it worked. The researchers observed that manipulating physical blocks gave participants a concrete, shareable way to express ideas about what an AAC system should actually do for them — something that's historically very hard to extract through a standard interview when verbal and text-based communication is itself the thing that's impaired. The blocks became a kind of common language between participant and researcher that didn't depend on fluent speech or writing to work.
There's a second, subtler finding worth sitting with: the same block, given to different participants, got used in different ways depending on their personal communication needs. That's not a bug in the system — it's the entire point. A rigid, one-size-fits-all AAC tool can't flex to that kind of individual variation. A small set of composable building blocks, it turns out, can.
The trade-off the researchers are honest about
This paper doesn't oversell what tangible block programming can do. The researchers are explicit that constraining the system to a limited set of pre-defined blocks and data types necessarily limits what participants can express — you can only build what the available pieces allow. But they frame this as a deliberate trade-off rather than a flaw: that same constraint is what keeps the cognitive load low enough for people with aphasia to actually use the system without being overwhelmed by boundless options. In accessible design, less expressive power that's actually usable beats more expressive power that nobody can navigate.
The study also surfaced a broader pattern worth flagging for the whole AAC field: participants described needing flexible options in daily life badly enough that some of them were already using multiple apps — sometimes stretching an app well outside its intended purpose — just to cover their actual communication needs. That's a quiet indictment of how narrowly most AAC tools are scoped, and it's exactly the gap user-programmable tools are aimed at closing.
Why this matters beyond the prototype
The paper's contribution isn't really the specific block system — it's the demonstration that visual, tangible programming is a viable way for people with aphasia to directly shape their own AI-driven communication tools, without needing fluent natural language to do it. That has two layers of significance.
First, as a product direction: it points toward a future where AAC users aren't just consumers of whatever vocabulary set or AI feature a developer shipped, but active builders of tools tailored to their own lives — ordering coffee, talking to a doctor, chatting with a grandchild — using an interface that doesn't require the very skill their condition affects most.
Second, as a research method: the researchers note that physical blocks worked as well as they did specifically becausethey gave participants with aphasia an alternative channel to articulate needs that's independent of verbal or written communication. That's a methodological lesson other AAC and accessibility researchers can borrow, independent of whether anyone ever builds a commercial product from this exact system.
What's next
The authors are clear-eyed about the limits of an eight-person lab study: future work needs a larger, more diverse group of participants across different aphasia profiles and severities, further refinement of the physical blocks themselves, and — critically — testing outside the controlled workshop setting to see whether this holds up in the messiness of everyday computer-mediated communication. They also flag a genuinely open question for the field: how do you take an aphasia-friendly programming paradigm like this and actually deploy it inside real, everyday AAC systems, rather than leaving it as a research prototype?
That's the gap between a promising CHI paper and a shipped product — but it's a gap worth watching. If user-programmable AI tools make it out of the lab, they'd represent a genuine shift in who gets to decide what an AAC device does: not just the engineers who build it, but the person who has to rely on it every day.
AAC Awareness Month Roundup: The AI Tools Pushing Past the Legacy AAC Ceiling
Every October, AAC Awareness Month asks the community to look at how far communication technology has come — and anyone who's spent time with a legacy symbol board or a static word-prediction keyboard knows the honest answer is: not far enough, fast enough. Grid navigation is slow. Vocabulary sets are generic. And building a personalized board has traditionally meant hours of a speech therapist's or caregiver's unpaid time.
This year's roundup looks at three projects — a research prototype, a youth-founded nonprofit app, and a commercial AAC platform — that are each attacking a different piece of that legacy bottleneck with AI. None of them are finished products solving every problem. But together they sketch a genuinely different ceiling for what AAC can do.
R-Speak: AI that interprets aphasic speech itself, not just text
Most AI-in-AAC work assumes the user is typing. R-Speak, a co-designed prototype out of Sheffield Hallam University, starts from a harder problem: people with expressive aphasia often can speak, but their words come out disordered, incomplete, or substituted — and current tools don't know what to do with that.
R-Speak uses large language models to interpret fragmented or aphasic speech itself and reconstruct it into coherent, intended sentences — a meaningfully different job than predicting the next word in a clean input. The team tested eight LLMs against real transcripts from AphasiaBank before landing on Mixtral (8x7B) for their first working prototype, which they then tested with four people with aphasia and one care partner, plus a six-person clinician focus group.
The results are a genuinely hopeful signal: participants with aphasia rated the tool as good on the System Usability Scale (mean score of 75) and expressed real enthusiasm about what it could mean for their independence — more so, notably, than the clinicians in the study, who were more cautious about real-world benefit. That gap is worth sitting with: it's the people living with aphasia who saw the clearest upside.
The research team didn't stop at "does this work" — they went on to test 12 lightweight, open-weight models (as small as 0.5B parameters) to find versions fast and light enough to run practically, eventually finding that a 3-billion-parameter model (Qwen 2.5:3B) hit a strong balance of accuracy and near-instant response time. That's a meaningful detail: it suggests this kind of support doesn't require massive cloud infrastructure to be clinically useful, which matters enormously for cost and access. Next up for the team: refining the prototype into a full phone app and testing it with a larger, broader group of people with mild-to-moderate aphasia.
ConnectAAC: built by a teenager who saw the gap firsthand
If R-Speak represents academic rigor, ConnectAAC represents something else entirely: lived urgency, built fast. ConnectAAC was created by Ayana Singh, a 16-year-old founder who started the youth-led nonprofit Equal Speaks after watching a family member run into exactly the communication barriers this whole genre of app is trying to solve.
ConnectAAC combines visual communication cards, personalized user profiles, text-to-speech, and — the part that separates it from a standard symbol board — context-relevant word and sentence suggestions. Instead of making a user hunt through nested menus to find the word they need, the app tries to surface likely language based on the situation at hand, across settings like home, school, healthcare, and the community. It's available as a web app and on Android, free to the families and clinicians who need it.
What makes this one worth including isn't just the technology — plenty of apps offer predictive suggestions — it's who built it and why. ConnectAAC is explicit that it's a supplementary resource, not a replacement for individualized clinical evaluation or an established AAC system, which is the right kind of humility for an emerging tool. But as a demonstration that the barrier to building genuinely helpful AAC tech has dropped low enough for a teenager with a cause to ship something real, it's a meaningful marker of where this space is headed.
Spoken: AI word prediction at scale, with 300,000 users and counting
Spoken takes a more mature, commercial approach — and its scale is the point. The app uses AI-powered word prediction paired with natural-sounding text-to-speech, and it's been used by more than 300,000 people navigating aphasia, autism, cerebral palsy, ALS, Parkinson's, stroke, and other speech and language conditions.
The core pitch is personalization over time: Spoken learns a user's individual speech patterns and adapts its predictions the more it's used, rather than offering one static vocabulary set to everyone. Users can also actively teach it about themselves to sharpen its suggestions — echoing exactly the kind of personalized-context feature that researchers in this space (including the CHI '23 "speech macros" study we covered last time) consistently find AAC users want most.
Spoken's user reviews tell a consistent story: people describe it as the difference between being stuck mid-sentence in a hospital bed and actually being able to tell a family member they love them. That's the unglamorous, high-stakes use case that legacy AAC tools have struggled with — not because the hardware couldn't do it, but because static, generic vocabulary sets simply aren't fast or personal enough in the moment that matters.
The throughline
What connects all of these — from a university research prototype to a teen-founded nonprofit app to a 300,000-user commercial platform — is that each is chipping away at a different piece of what made legacy AAC so exhausting: rigid vocabulary, slow navigation, and one-size-fits-all design. None of them have solved every problem AAC users have raised about AI (privacy, hallucination, and loss of personal voice remain live concerns across this research, our own past coverage included). But the direction is unmistakable: AAC is moving from static and generic toward adaptive and personal, and that shift is worth genuinely celebrating this Awareness Month.
What 12 AAC Users Taught Researchers About the Future of AI-Powered Speech 👩🔬
For decades, AAC users have faced a communication tax that most people never have to pay. Augmented communicators typically produce speech at 3–20 words per minute, against 100–140 WPM for typical speakers — a gap wide enough to reshape entire relationships. People report losing the ability to joke, to add nuance, to jump into a conversation before the moment has passed. Every reply is a calculation: how much do I have to say, and can I afford the physical and cognitive cost of saying it?
Prior research has documented AAC users doing hours of prep work before a single doctor's appointment or meeting, just to have answers ready in time. This is the baseline AI has to improve on — and it's a low bar in the sense that almost anything that saves keystrokes helps, but a high bar in the sense that it has to help without taking away the one thing AAC users have fought hardest to keep: their own voice.
A team from Google Research, Carnegie Mellon, and UCL tested exactly that trade-off. They built three "speech macros" — small, purpose-built prompts on top of a large language model — and put them in front of 12 adult AAC users over live video calls to see what actually helped.
The three tools
Extend Reply — type "work," and in reply to "Do you want to get pizza?" get a full, contextually appropriate sentence like "I'm already at work" or "I'm busy with work today."
Reply with Background Information — pre-load a short bio, and let the model draw on it to answer questions like "Do you like animals?" with specific, personal detail.
Turn Words into Requests — type "bathroom" or "tea," and get a polite, ready-to-speak request.
The upside was real — and participants felt it immediately
This wasn't a lukewarm response to a nice-to-have feature. It was closer to relief. Participants described the potential to type less as directly opening up social life that fatigue currently closes off — one explained that she often doesn't even start conversations because she doesn't have the energy to type enough to keep up, and that shortcut alone could change whether she engages at all. Another pointed out that the suggestions did more than save keystrokes — they took over some of the cognitive labor of guessing what response would be socially "correct," freeing up attention that would otherwise go toward simultaneously composing a sentence and operating the device itself.
The "Turn Words into Requests" macro was the standout: for everyday needs — TV, sleep, a drink, tea and biscuits — it consistently produced usable, appropriate requests, and it was rated the most useful of the three tools by a clear margin. That's a meaningful result on its own: a huge share of AAC communication is functional and repetitive, and this is exactly the category where AI has room to eliminate real friction with very little downside.
The background-information macro showed something even more striking: genuine world knowledge doing useful work. Told that a participant was from Sri Lanka, the model inferred she might enjoy the beach — an unprompted, contextually sound guess that impressed her precisely because it felt like it understood something about her rather than just echoing her words back. Another participant watched the model correctly identify that his favorite soccer team was based in Guadalajara and build that detail into a full sentence — a level of inference no static word-prediction system could offer.
And crucially, participants weren't just impressed as observers — they immediately started imagining real use cases beyond the study: prepping for medical appointments so nothing gets lost under stress, ordering at a regular coffee shop, answering the "how are you?" they get asked dozens of times a day without having to type the same reply from scratch every time. That's the clearest signal that this isn't a novelty; it's solving problems people already have.
What still needs work — and why it's solvable
None of this means the tool was finished. The model sometimes filled in specific, unrequested details, guessed personal facts incorrectly, and occasionally missed high-stakes requests like medical suction or mobility transfers, defaulting to generic or unrelated phrases instead. A built-in safety filter also blocked a legitimate request in one case, redirecting a participant away from something he had every right to ask for himself.
The through-line in all of this feedback, though, isn't "this doesn't work" — it's "this needs to work for me specifically." Participants wanted the ability to feed in medical details, relationship context, and personal shorthand (many already had their own systems, like typing "1y" for yes or "WON1" for wonderful) so the model could learn their world instead of guessing at it generically. That's a solvable design problem, not a ceiling on the technology — and it points toward AI-enabled AAC that's tuned to the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all predictor.
Participants also had clear, reasonable conditions for adoption: real encryption, real control over when the system is drawing on live context, and the ability to edit or override any suggestion before it's spoken. None of these are objections to the concept — they're the product requirements for building it responsibly.
The bigger picture
What this study captures is a group of expert communicators — people who have spent years optimizing around a genuinely difficult input problem — looking at a new tool and seeing a path to something better than what they've had. Not a replacement for their own voice, but a way to reclaim time, energy, and spontaneity that the current generation of AAC devices structurally can't offer. The researchers' own framing is telling: participants didn't just want less typing, they wanted the right less typing — customizable, personal, and theirs. That's a far more exciting design target than simple word prediction, and this study is early evidence that large language models can actually hit it.
Low cost stroke and aphasia speech apps (AAC) that can do everything the expensive ones can (and maybe more) 🧐
Do I really need Lingraphica, Tobii Dynavox (TD Snap), or other expensive hardware?
Thousands of stroke survivors lose their ability to speak. In outpatient rehab, they're routinely funneled toward dominant, legacy, incumbent speech-generating devices whose hardware runs $7,000-$9,000 and is often fully covered by insurance once a Speech Language Pathologist signs off on "medical necessity."
These devices are notoriously hard to program, and "AAC device abandonment" is well documented in the field. By the time patients get home and discover the device is impractical to use, their deductible is already blown—money that could have gone toward the low-tech tools and continued therapy that often works better.
I share this perspective from personal experience, and a desire to help others going through what we’ve been through.
It’s regrettable that a well-meaning insurance and referral system can reliably produce such a bad outcome: vendor relationships baked into clinical referral pathways, funding tied to a diagnosis and a signature rather than a proven, whole-patient treatment plan, and the most vulnerable, least-informed party in the room (a patient weeks removed from a stroke) footing the bill for a system no single actor is incentivized to fix.
There is a silver lining—with the advances in AI over the past few years, we no longer have to rely on decades-old technology to fix a modern problem. Just search the App Store, and you’ll see multiple low cost options to try out.
No two stroke survivors are exactly alike, which is what makes it so difficult to development whole-person treatment plans. By selecting which apps and features are right for your situation, you can assemble a more modular, tailored approach to recovery. That said, when it comes to aphasia and AAC, app fatigue is real. I think we can all agree nobody wants to spend their days researching AAC apps.
Note—these recs are speech support apps, or speech aids, with bonus points for leveraging AI. They are not speech therapy for relearning how to speak. That’s a separate area, and there are many other apps that offer features for that. In our opinion, there’s just no replacement for what real, in-person speech language pathologists do, which is why Broca addresses a different need.
ASoft’s Speech Assistant AAC ($24.99 one-time purchase)
Customizable phrase buttons with text-to-speech output. Website: https://www.asoft.nl
Apple Accessibility Feature: Keyboard Type To Speak (Already on your iPhone, just tap the side button 3 times and a keyboard will pop up)
Vocable AAC (Free)
Its "Smart Assist" feature uses an Azure-based GPT engine to generate contextual response options during Listening Mode conversations, on top of head-tracking input.
Spoken—Tap to Talk AAC ($12.99/mo, $99.99/yr, or $249.99 one-time)
Uses predictive AI to learn a user's phrasing and speeds up sentence-building; markets itself explicitly as "the smart AAC app… with predictive AI."
SpeakAid (Speech Central, AAC) ($7.99/wk or $49.99/yr)
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/speech-central-aac-speakaid/id6745821966
Layers an LLM on the classic symbol-board format: AI phrase suggestions, auto-organized/re-categorized boards, and premium ElevenLabs voice synthesis.
Zip EasySpeak AI (Free, open-source)
Runs a lightweight on-device AI model that predicts next words and expands short keywords into full grammatical sentences, fully offline.
Speak My Mind – Smart AAC App (Free)
"Smart Word Prediction" learns what you're likely to say and adapts vocabulary/categories over time; used across autism, ALS, stroke, and other populations.
Aphasia Talk Help Text Speech (Free or $10 for some regions)
Images, handwriting, Text To Speech, and predictive text communication.
How to Unlock Apple’s Hidden Premium & Personal Voices for Aphasia Support: A Caregiver’s Guide 📱🔤 🎤
For individuals living with aphasia—especially those navigating the frustrations of Expressive (Broca’s) Aphasia—finding a voice that sounds natural, dignified, and clear is a game-changer. Standard text-to-speech voices can often sound robotic, stripping away the human element of communication. In our opinion, with what tech is capable of today, this is unacceptable and plain silly.
For the time being, there’s Apple’s Premium Voices, and more cutting-edge Personal Voice cloning tool. While ElevenLabs’ Instant Voice Cloning is, by many accounts, better, it’s outside of the Apple ecosystem and harder to stitch together with Apple’s built-in accessibility features. This warrants a separate, future post. The most important thing to note here is that if someone still has some ability to speak, it may be worth capturing some of their speech using one of these tools. Those recordings could be used to recreate their actual voice digitally, should they so desire at some point down the line.
If you are a caregiver helping a loved one setup their device, this step-by-step guide will show you how to unlock these premium voices and set up "Live Speech" shortcuts for daily communication.
Step 1: Download Apple’s High-Quality "Premium" Voices
Apple provides completely free, somewhat realistic "Premium" and "Enhanced" versions of its standard system voices. They are hidden deep in the accessibility menu but make a massive difference in how natural the text-to-speech sounds.
Open the Settings app on the iPhone.
Scroll down and tap Accessibility.
Under the Vision section, tap Spoken Content.
Tap Voices.
Select your loved one's primary Language (e.g., English).
Tap a voice name from the list (we highly recommended option: Evan).
Tap the Download cloud icon next to the Premium or Enhanced version.
💡 Caregiver Tip: Premium voices are large, high-quality audio files. Ensure the iPhone is connected to Wi-Fi before downloading.
Step 2: Create a "Personal Voice" (For Progressive or Partial Speech)
If your loved one still has some verbal capabilities and wants a voice that sounds exactly like their own, Apple’s Personal Voice feature (available on iOS 17 and later) is revolutionary.
Go to Settings > Accessibility.
Scroll down to the Speech section and tap Personal Voice.
Tap Create a Personal Voice.
Follow the on-screen prompts. The iPhone will ask them to read aloud a series of 150 short text phrases.
Once the 15-20 minute recording session is finished, plug the iPhone into its charger and lock the screen. The phone securely processes and clones the voice locally overnight.
💡 Caregiver Tip: Living with aphasia or verbal apraxia means speech fatigue is very real. You do not have to do this all at once. You can pause the recording session at any time and resume it later when they have more energy.
Step 3: 🌟 Activate "Live Speech" to hear anything you type played out loud, right from your phone 🌟
Once you have downloaded a Premium Voice or generated a Personal Voice, you need a quick way for your loved one to use it in daily conversations. Live Speech allows them to triple-click the iPhone's power button from any app to instantly type and talk.
Go back to Settings > Accessibility.
Scroll down to the Speech section and tap Live Speech.
Toggle Live Speech to ON.
Tap Voices directly below the toggle, and select the Premium voice or the Personal Voice you set up in the previous steps.
🌟 Tap Favorite Phrases to pre-save highly frequent commands or needs (e.g., "I am tired,""I need water,"or "Please give me a moment to type").🌟
Making It Seamless: The Accessibility Shortcut
Once this setup is complete, communication is just three clicks away. Triple-click the iPhone’s side/power button, and a clean text box will appear at the bottom of the screen. Your loved one can type out their thoughts or tap a favorite pre-saved phrase, and their iPhone will instantly speak it in a clear, high-quality voice.
By pairing Apple's built-in accessibility features with dedicated speech tools like Broca AI Speech, we can bridge the communication gap, reduce conversational frustration, and give individuals with aphasia their voice back.
Fall 2026 AAC Roundup: What the Big Labs Are Bringing to Communication Tech 👩🔬🧠📱
AAC has always moved slower than the rest of consumer tech, for good reason — vocabulary systems, motor planning, and clinical trust take years to earn. But this year, the gap between "frontier AI lab" and "AAC device" has been closing fast. Here's what's new and what's coming as we head into fall 2026.
Google DeepMind and Android: sign language finally gets a text bridge
The headline release this season is SL2T (sign-language-to-text), a model from Google DeepMind and Android that translates ASL directly into text in real time. It's now live in Gboard and Live Transcribe, starting on Pixel 11, with more devices and sign languages planned. It's not marketed as an AAC app, but functionally it's doing AAC-adjacent work: turning an expressive modality that most devices can't parse into text that any app, keyboard, or captioning system can use. Google has said explicitly that full parity with spoken and written languages is the long-term goal, and that sign language generation — not just recognition — is next. That's the piece AAC teams should watch closely, since a model that can generate sign output could eventually let AAC systems talk back in sign, not just text-to-speech.
Project Euphonia's open-sourcing moment
Google's longer-running effort, Project Euphonia, has spent years collecting speech samples from people with ALS, cerebral palsy, and other conditions that produce atypical speech, in order to train better speech recognition. This year the project shifted from closed data collection to an open-source GitHub release, handing its research and tooling to developers who want to build personalized ASR models for non-standard speech. Paired with the Speech Accessibility Project (a University of Illinois–led effort Google backs alongside Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft), this is a meaningful move: the training data and techniques for understanding disordered speech are no longer locked inside one company's research org. Expect smaller AAC and speech-recognition vendors to start building on this over the next year.
The incumbents are quietly adding AI, not replacing themselves
The established AAC players — Proloquo (AssistiveWare), TD Snap (Tobii Dynavox), TouchChat, CoughDrop, Grid — haven't pivoted to chatbot interfaces, and that's mostly by design. But AI is showing up in other ways:
Just-in-time vocabulary generation. Academic work (presented at ASSETS and CHI this year) has tested using large multimodal models to auto-populate visual scene displays with contextually relevant vocabulary on the fly, evaluated directly against SLP-created boards. Early results are promising… but we already knew this. 🙂
AI-generated symbols. A framework published this year explores using text-to-image generation to create personalized, culturally specific pictograms — useful for the long tail of concepts that commercial symbol sets don't cover well.
Ultra-personalized phrase prediction. CHI 2026 also featured an autoethnographic study of a fine-tuned personal language model for AAC phrase suggestions — and it surfaced the hard part of this trend: personalization improves speed, but it raises real questions about agency, identity, and privacy when a model starts finishing your sentences based on your own communication history.
What to watch this fall
Whether SL2T's roadmap toward sign language generation starts showing up in developer previews.
Whether any major AAC vendor formally integrates a generative "board-builder" feature rather than leaving it in research prototypes.
More open datasets and models emerging from Project Euphonia's GitHub release, and whether they get adopted outside Google's own products.
The theme underneath all of this: the frontier labs are increasingly treating communication access as a first-class AI problem, not a side project — and we all stand to benefit from the AAC space taking a giant AI leap forward.
📚 What to read after someone you know has a stroke
As an English major and a lifelong reader, one of the only things I could bring myself to do while I was sitting in the ICU with my mom was to search for a book. On what exactly, I didn’t know—stroke recovery, caregiving support, life, death, and grief. Reading creates space for immersion, empathy, reflection. Through someone else’s experience, you find clarity in your own.
Over the course of the last 4 years, I’ve turned to many books to help me process and digest. Curating a few of them here.
My Stroke of Insight, a Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
I read this for the first time during the long visiting hours in the ICU
This is a firsthand account of what it feels like to experience a stroke, and the recovery, chronicled in great detail by American neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. It helped me know what to say when my mom was intubated, and how to help when she couldn’t speak at all. It taught me that just being present is enough.
Hope After Stroke, For Caregivers and Survivors, by Tsgoyna Tanzman
A more tactical guide
This is a good read once you’re ready to start diving into the process of recovery. It’s a long road, and this is a window into what it will take—along with some helpful insight from someone who has seen this season up close many times.
The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D.
Answers from science
While I may never stop wondering how this could happen, this book at least provided some scientific explanation of what happened. It’s a step toward understanding the physicality of “how,” separated from the emotions of “why.” It’s also heartening to learn in laymen’s terms how much the brain can transform with small investments in habit.
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
An author’s version of grief
I didn’t read this until years after the stroke, as it isn’t tactical or especially linear. While I’ll continue to read chronicles of grief as part of how I process life, I found this relatable in that it’s a little hard to parse, and feels a little disoriented, exactly as grief does. The word the author uses more than once to describe her memories is “mudgy,” which circles the impossible-to-describe overwhelming weight of grief.
When Breath Becomes Air, by Dr. Paul Kalanithi
The book everyone should read before they die
I’ve read this book 5 times, and will probably read it 5 more. It’s a posthumously published memoir by a Stanford neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at age 36. The book details his journey from a doctor treating the dying to a vulnerable patient. It’s incredible for every reason you’d imagine, but as a student of literature at Stanford before medicine he was also extraordinarily well-read.
Kalanithi fills the book with literary references. Here's what stands out:
Quoted as epigraphs / recurring touchstones
T.S. Eliot — especially The Waste Land, which he returns to repeatedly for its themes of meaninglessness and isolation, and the poem "Whispers of Immortality." He quotes The Waste Land in particular and is greatly affected by its themes of meaninglessness, isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection.
Montaigne — his essay "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die" opens one section.
The King James Bible
Fulke Greville's "Caelica 83" — the poem that gives the book its title.
His favorite book
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne (1643) — a spiritual memoir he describes his teacher Shep Nuland as having quoted on his deathbed.
Other classics he references throughout
Shakespeare's Hamlet, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Non-literary but relevant
How We Die by Sherwin "Shep" Nuland — he refers to his experience reading this 1995 book, one of the first to confront death head-on and fuel a national conversation about end-of-life decisions.
A bonus suggestion from AI: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande — not stroke-specific, but essential on medicine, aging, and what matters at the end of capability; pairs naturally with When Breath Becomes Air.
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis
For when I’m ready
This is next on my reading list, but won’t read until I have the space to process it. I expect this book to cut more into why these things happen, vs. what and how.
👩🏼 👋 Allow us to reintroduce ourselves
We’ve had quite a whirlwind of activity going on over here at Broca, so I thought I’d share some of our story and progress (and give some insight into where we’re going next).
For those of you who have been with us since the very beginning, you know we started Broca to give my mom a way to participate in real-time conversations after a stroke took away her ability to verbalize her thoughts and intentions. We’ve heard from many people in similar situations. It’s frustrating for the people trying to communicate, and maybe equally frustrating when you can’t understand what someone wants, feels, or needs. Not to mention, self expression goes far behind basic human needs. It’s an impossible situation, and very unfair. Time goes by (in our case, 4 years), and we start to accept the relationship the way it is, leaving the person with aphasia to muddle through various tools and devices without ever really finding a great solution… or coming to find peace with the reality of the situation. I wish I could say our experience is unique, but in the last 4 years I’ve come to learn it is a somewhat common occurrence—certainly a part of the human experience that should be more well-known and understood than it is.
AI has changed so much of this, so fast. Things that weren’t possible just 2 years ago are possible now. At Broca, we’ve done a lot of work on our unique mix of inputs that make our suggestions great. The reason it feels like Broca “knows” the speaker is because the parameters and context window we’ve defined for our LLM are extraordinarily dialed-in. The way the suggestions generate is no accident.
As we continue to iterate, we know there is no replacement for speech therapy and true speaking ability—but we believe we can offer something no one else has, and help people in a way that the existing tools simply can’t. We’re proud of the concept, proud of the work, and have an unbelievable runway of features on our backlog we can’t wait to bring to market. We want Broca to be so smart, so fun, and so easy to use, that people with aphasia are just a quick reference to their phone away from witty banter, a personalized reply, or a word of encouragement. I’m doing this for my mom, but I’m also doing it for everyone else in my shoes. People with aphasia are the same as they always were—it’s time to give them the resources they need to express the big personalities they’ve always had.
My mom on mother’s day, 2026.
🗣️ What makes a good conversation?
What makes a conversation successful? What makes a conversation with a person with aphasia successful?
I posed this question to Anthropic’s Claude, to try to tease out what kinds of features would be most helpful in supporting listener-oriented conversation. For the most part, I agree with this perspective:
A successful conversation generally involves a few core elements:
Mutual understanding — both people feel they've been heard and comprehended, even if they disagree.
Turn-taking and reciprocity — the exchange flows naturally, with each person having space to contribute.
Shared purpose — whether it's exchanging information, building connection, solving a problem, or simply enjoying each other's company, both parties are oriented toward something together.
Responsiveness — each person reacts to what the other actually said, not just waiting for their own turn to speak.
Repair — when misunderstandings happen (and they always do), both people work together to clear them up without significant friction.
Psychological safety — people feel free to express themselves without fear of judgment or ridicule.
Success doesn't require eloquence or equal contribution — it requires that both people leave feeling the exchange was worthwhile.
When I think about conversations with my mom, there’s so much she wants to say. She is always one to weigh in, provide reassurance, or give a witty retort. She has a terrific sense of humor. None of the AAC solutions today enable her to relate to people how she used to.
I generated a visualization of this need as a pyramid, where the most nuanced elements of a successful conversation are featured at the top. At Broca, this is where we’re focused next.
👟Women’s functional gift guide for stroke recovery
Fashion and function for recovery and life after stroke.
Fashion and function for recovery and life after stroke.
When you find yourself caring for a loved one or friend in the hospital or in recovery from something difficult, you want to do anything you can to make their day a little better. In my mom’s case, there was an outpouring of support, cards, flowers, and meals from her community. She felt very loved, and I know it made a big difference for her during a long, difficult hospital stay.
Here’s our latest compilation of other items that might make for nice gifts for someone in recovery—select an image to open the link in a new window.
Accessories
This statement necklace by LA Loop doubles as a convenient place to hook your glasses when not in use. For people with limited mobility, it’s helpful to have access to necessities in ways that are hands-free.
Footwear
Vivaia Square-Toe Mary Jane flats are lightweight, easy for a caregiver to put on, stay on your feet, and come in wide sizes.
Arcopedico Women’s Estrela Mary Jane flat
A slightly more supportive Mary Jane flat. Also comes in a number of colors and styles.
Zip-up house coats, dusters, and caftans
Channel Chrissy Teigan and immerse yourself in the world of kimonos, caftans, robes, and the like.
Links below:
Casual Nights Women's Zip-Front Lounger Robe Long Duster Housecoat with Pockets
Dreamcrest Women’s Snap-Front House Coat Flannel Duster Robe with Pockets
Natori Deco Printed Charmeuse Zip Caftan
Natori Medallion Zip Up Caftan
Tops and dresses for limited mobility
It can be challenging to get dressed when your body is recovering. Anything with a zip front or button down makes for easier mornings. We suggest a satin long-sleeve button up or a lightweight cotton dress.
Links below:
Compression
For people with limited mobility, swelling is a common problem. Compression sleeves can reduce swelling and improve circulation.
📍🗺️ Coming soon: New features on our roadmap
We're always listening to your feedback and working to make Broca AI Speech even more helpful for meaningful conversations. Here's a sneak peek at four exciting features coming to Broca's roadmap that will make communication with loved ones with aphasia even better.
🔤 Word Count Setting: Say It Your Way
Every person communicates differently—some prefer brief, direct responses while others like to elaborate. Our new Word Count setting gives you an easy way to adjust how many words appear in each suggestion card, from short and sweet to more detailed expressions.
Why it matters: Communication style is personal. Some people with aphasia feel more comfortable with concise phrases like "Yes, sounds good," while others want to express themselves more fully with responses like "Yes, that sounds really good to me. I'd like that." Now you can customize Broca to match their natural communication style and cognitive comfort level.
Example: Choose "Brief" for quick, 2-4 word responses, "Moderate" for standard phrases, or "Detailed" for fuller sentences that convey more nuance and emotion.
🧑 User Bios: Your Story Powers Smarter Suggestions
You can already create a personalized bio that helps Broca understand the person with aphasia on a deeper level, but we’re taking it a step further with categories and input suggestions. Our new design makes it easy to know what to include—share their interests, hobbies, routines, favorite topics, and important people in their life—and watch as Broca's AI-powered suggestions become even more relevant and meaningful.
Why it matters: Generic suggestions are helpful, but personalized ones are powerful. Whether your loved one is passionate about gardening, has grandchildren they adore, or has specific daily routines, Broca will use this context to offer response cards that truly reflect who they are.
Example: When asked "What would you like to do today?" someone whose bio mentions a love of birds might see suggestions like "I'd like to watch the bird feeder" or "Let's go to the park to see the ducks."
📌 ⭐️ Pinned Favorites: Quick Access to High-Frequency Cards
We know that certain phrases come up again and again in daily life. That's why we're introducing Pinned Favorites—a way to keep your most-used response cards right at your fingertips.
Why it matters: For phrases like "I need to use the bathroom," "I'm hungry," "Yes, please," or "I love you," waiting for Broca to suggest them isn't always practical. With Pinned Favorites, these essential cards will always be easily accessible, making communication faster when it matters most.
Think of it as your communication shortcuts—always there, always ready.
🧠 Memory: Personalization That Learns Over Time
Even without manually entering a bio, Broca will soon remember. Our new memory feature will track conversation patterns, frequently selected responses, and topics that come up often—then use this information to make suggestions even more tailored.
Why it matters: Personalization shouldn't require homework. As you use Broca, it will naturally learn what matters most to the person with aphasia. Did they mention their dog three times this week? Broca will remember. Do they always ask about their daughter on Tuesday afternoons? Broca will catch on.
This is AI that adapts to you—not the other way around.
The Bottom Line
These three features—User Bios, Pinned Favorites, and Memory—are all about the same goal: making Broca AI Speech feel less like a tool and more like a trusted communication partner that truly knows the person using it.
We can't wait to put these features in your hands. Stay tuned for updates, and as always, thank you for trusting Broca to help bridge the communication gap and bring your loved ones back into the conversation.
Want to be the first to know when these features launch? Check back for updates or follow us on LinkedIn
📱 iPhone accessibility features for people with aphasia
Tools you already have on your device for free
There are a lot of apps out there that charge a subscription fee for features you already have on your device for free. In a previous post, we talk about various tech solutions in Augmentative and Alternative Communication. I mention ChatGPT workarounds—one of which is to use built-in tools on your device instead of (or in addition to) AAC solutions. Odds are, you already have a phone, laptop, or tablet, and these features don’t cost anything extra. Here’s a list of built-in iPhone features that might help. (We’ll cover Android in a separate post.)
Creating a custom voice
Personal Voice: Allows you to create a voice that sounds like your own to be used with Live Speech and other features. Note this is something that probably only makes sense for speakers who have retained or recovered much of their speech. There is likely a way to capture your voice from old voicemails and videos, input them into AI (like ChatGPT) and have them read aloud to create this custom speaking voice, but we have not experimented that far.
How to create:
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Personal Voice
Follow the on-screen instructions to record your voice. From the reviews in online forums, this may take some work upfront to complete.
Type-To-Speech
Live Speech: Allows you to type what you want to say and have it spoken out loud during conversations or in apps like FaceTime.
How to use: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Live Speech and turn it on. Access it by triple-clicking the side/top button.
Saved phrases: You can save common phrases for quick access.
Personal Voice: If you create a Personal Voice, it can be used by default in Live Speech.
Toggle on “Live Speech.” From there, find saved phrases and recents.
Reading on-screen text
Spoken Content: This feature reads text aloud from your screen.
Speak Selection: Allows you to select a specific block of text in compatible apps and have it read aloud.
Read & Speak: In addition to Speak Selection and Speak Screen, this menu in Settings allows you to choose voices, dialects, and speaking rates.
Customization: You can customize the highlight style (word, sentence, or both) and other speech settings in Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
Reading physical text with the camera
Point and Speak: Uses the camera to read text on physical objects like signs or buttons in the real world.
How to use: Open the Magnifier app, tap "Detection Mode," and then select "Point and Speak." Point your camera at the text you want to be read aloud.
How to find speech accessibility features
Most of these features can be found in the Settings app.
Open the Settings app.
Tap Accessibility.
Scroll down to the Speech section to find options like Live Speech and Personal Voice.
For spoken content features, look in the Spoken Content menu under the Vision section of the Accessibility settings.
👩💻 AAC roundup: Tech for people with aphasia
There’s a lot out there. Here’s our take.
There’s a lot out there. Here’s our take.
When it comes to AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication), there are a lot of options. It can get pretty overwhelming, especially if you’re new to the space and just starting to research. Even the Speech Language Pathologists we spoke with felt like the industry is fragmented, and different solutions may work (or partially work) for different people in different circumstances.
Given that, I’m highlighting just a few tools, grouped into the following categories:
🧩 Sentence builders
👩🔬 ChatGPT workarounds
🤖 Speech recognition
👩❤️👨 Expression and understanding
Before diving in, note that I haven’t included any solutions that could be described as “therapy” or “speech practice.” This is a slightly different kind of solution, where products step users through exercises designed to help them enunciate and produce words—essentially, the tech version of the worksheets and homework they do with their Speech Language Pathologists. I’ve read that the key to improvement is just lots of practice and repetition, so for that, apps like these can help fill the gaps between speech therapy sessions. They’re just slightly outside of the space we’re in, which is more around facilitating conversation and communication.
Also note there’s a library of tools published by aphasia.org under Resources & Support > Tools & Technology. From there, you have access to many different types of tools in their Software Finder. It’s a good place to start your search.
Aphasia.org’s Software Finder. Solutions are categorized by functionality/need.
Ok, let’s jump in.
🧩 Sentence builders
Sentence builders come in many shapes and sizes. This is probably what most people think of first when they imagine alternative communication apps. While it’s a pretty crowded space, they pretty much all look like a grid of icons with categories for a person to select from. From talking to Speech Language Pathologists and our own experience, it seems like the most prevalent/promoted solutions are:
tobii dynavox (TD Snap)
Lingraphica TouchTalk
Proloquo2Go
tobii dynavox (TD Snap)
Lingraphica TouchTalk
Proloquo2Go
It’s a lot to navigate, and in our opinion, they’re all kind of the same. Lingraphica has some interesting features on their website that include typing into a text box to speak, drawing, and selecting from media on your device (presumably your camera roll… see below). We haven’t personally explored these features, because my mom is still pretty limited in what she can type and draw, but they seem promising for some. Note that you can now achieve some very similar functionality using ChatGPT, particularly type-to-speak. More on that next.
Lingraphica has a feature that allows users to type messages and have them spoken aloud.
Lingraphica’s draw feature.
Lingraphica’s media feature, where users can swipe through their pictures to share their most recent experiences or reuse drawings for frequently used messages. We haven’t explored this feature, but as a workaround might suggest just opening the camera roll on your phone.
Speech Assistant AAC app
These grids of static icons are the industry standard. For many years, it’s been the only option. We’ve talked to many Speech Language Pathologists, and none of them gave these products a ringing endorsement. We get it.
One maybe lesser-known solution we like is called Speech Assistant AAC. It seems to do pretty much everything the “big names” do, without requiring people to purchase some kind of hardware, and without all the added features and complexity. I think this one is worth a shot.
👩🔬 ChatGPT workarounds
We’re an AI-first product, which just means it’s an essential part of the experience (not shoehorned in as an afterthought). I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask ChatGPT how to use other tools to achieve text-to-voice. Response below.
If you're looking to convert text to speech (TTS) so you can hear it spoken aloud, here are a few ways to do it, depending on what you want to use:
1. Use Built-in Tools on Your Device
Windows
Narrator (built-in screen reader):
Settings > Accessibility > NarratorMicrosoft Edge Read Aloud:
Right-click text > “Read aloud”
macOS
Highlight text > Right-click > "Speech" > "Start Speaking"
iPhone/iPad
Enable in
Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content
Android
Enable in
Settings > Accessibility > Select to Speak
2. Use Online TTS Tools
You can paste your text and hear it spoken out loud:
ttsmp3.com
voicemaker.in
text-to-speech.online
Google Translate (paste text, click the speaker icon)
3. Use Browser Extensions
Read Aloud (Chrome/Edge/Firefox extension)
Natural Reader
Speechify
ChatGPT Voice Mode
ChatGPT also offers voice mode. It’s pretty incredible, particularly the voices (you get to pick which one you like the sound of best). Something to explore.
ChatGPT voice mode
Aphasia Talk Help Text Speech app
And finally, there’s an app that looks like it’s just dipping its toe in the AI waters with a sentence builder that includes predictive text/autocomplete. We couldn’t quite get it to work how we wanted, but it could be a feature to watch. Like some of the bigger names, it also has a canvas for drawing. Plus, it has emojis, which you know we’re a big fan of 🙂.
Aphasia Talk Help Text Speech
🤖 Speech recognition
Project Relate, Voiceitt
Even with AI and all of the technological advances, speech recognition is a hard code to crack. We published a blog post on what we mean by speech recognition, where you can find more details about what Google is up to in this space. Basically, big tech is working on ways to understand atypical speakers, caption their words, and translate them for people who aren’t as familiar with their unique form of speech. This is an ideal state.
In addition to Google’s Project Relate, there’s a solution called Voiceitt, which describes itself as technology that combines state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with a proprietary database of atypical speech patterns. I believe its aim is similar to that of Google’s, which is to decipher non-standard speech—in their case, for voice assistants to better understand spoken prompts.
Of course, this kind of solution only applies to people who can produce some speech. For people with severe apraxia, this probably won’t make sense.
Voiceitt’s app is designed to make it easier for people with non-standard speech to control their smart home devices.
👩❤️👨 Expression and understanding
ARC’s Talk Tools
The Aphasia Recovery Connection brings together the community of folks with aphasia, family, friends, and caregivers. They offer a non-tech solution on their website that keeps communication simple—printable sheets with topics categorized by situation.
Find them here: https://aphasiarecoveryconnection.org/talk-tools/
The Aphasia Recovery Connection has printable sheets under the Resources section of their website.
An example of one of the situation-based printable sheets on the ARC resources page. This is actually a great model for how to prompt Broca (start by telling it where you are, and a few options for what someone with aphasia might need or be trying to do). Broca can achieve a similar outcome to these printable sheets, but faster and more dynamically, with unlimited scenarios, options, and possibilities.
Email Smart Reply
Depending on your settings, you may see a few suggested replies to an email in your inbox. Gmail and Outlook both have this feature. It’s essentially doing for your email what Broca does for spoken conversation—skimming the content of the initial email, and suggesting context-based responses for you to choose from. These used to be easy to ignore, but have gotten increasingly more relevant with the advances made in AI. They’re a really good way for someone with aphasia to continue to leverage email to communicate and respond.
Google’s way of describing the auto-responses generated at the bottom of an email.
Based on your settings, you may see options like these at the bottom of an email. It gives users a way to reply with one click.
Broca AI Speech
And finally, Broca. I put us in the expression and understanding space, meaning our solution is intended to help facilitate connection—and help family members better understand. It’s designed to supplement and augment conversation, not replace speech.
Try it out and let us know what others are in this space—AI moves fast, and we expect the AAC industry to change with it.
Broca AI Speech
Analog honorable mention
Worksheets, workbooks, flashcards. There’s a lot out there. What I noticed about my mom’s recovery specifically is that she needs to practice blended sounds, not just the individual letters of the alphabet.
For that, I found this set of flashcards, which I am not in any way sponsored for recommending. It’s just something that’s working for us that I thought I’d feature here.
💬 How One Man with Aphasia Used ChatGPT to Tell His Story
Imagine wanting to write your life story—but every time you try, the words won’t come out right. That’s what life was like for a 75-year-old man living with aphasia, a language disorder that makes writing and speaking challenging. After a stroke eight years ago, he struggled with word-finding, grammar, and organizing his thoughts on paper. But he had a goal: to write his autobiography.
That’s where ChatGPT came in.
As part of a 10-session program at a university clinic, he started working with a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and ChatGPT to see if AI could help. Each session followed a simple pattern. First, he wrote on his own—short paragraphs, sentences, even just ideas. Then, he used ChatGPT with help from the SLP. They followed a visual prompt guide (kind of like a flowchart) to tell ChatGPT exactly what he needed: reword this, expand that, fix the grammar, etc. Over time, he got better at using these prompts himself.
The difference was amazing. When he used ChatGPT, he wrote more, with fewer errors, and felt more confident. He still had full control over the content—it was his voice and his memories—but ChatGPT helped polish it up. By the end of the program, he had written enough to print a small autobiography to share with his family. And a year later? He was still using ChatGPT for creative writing like song lyrics and stories.
This case shows that AI tools like ChatGPT, when used with support and structure, can be more than just tech—they can be empowering, especially for people working through language challenges. 💡
Read the full article: Harnessing AI for aphasia: a case report on ChatGPT's role in supporting written expression
👯♀️ Why friendships matter so much in stroke recovery with aphasia
It isn’t just about communication. It’s about being seen.
When someone has a stroke and ends up with aphasia — a language disorder that affects speaking, understanding, reading, or writing — life changes in a big way. Communication, something most of us take for granted, suddenly becomes a daily challenge. But one thing that doesn’t change? The deep human need for connection.
In fact, staying socially connected — having real conversations and meaningful relationships — is just as important as speech therapy or medical care when it comes to healing and quality of life.
More than just talking
Aphasia doesn’t affect intelligence, but it can make it hard to get words out or follow fast-paced conversations. That can make people with aphasia feel isolated — not just from strangers, but even from close friends or family.
In a recent article in Topics in Language Disorders, researchers Sarah Finke and Brittany Therrien shine a light on how important friendships are for people with communication disabilities like aphasia. They argue that conversations aren’t just about exchanging information — they’re how we bond, laugh, support each other, and build a sense of belonging.
Think about your own friendships. They're made up of text messages, inside jokes, catching up over coffee, or venting after a tough day. When communication becomes harder, those little moments can disappear — unless people around the person with aphasia know how to help keep that connection going.
The hard truth: Some friendships don’t survive
Research shows that after a stroke, some people with aphasia lose touch with friends — not because the friendship isn’t valued, but because friends don’t know how to stay connected when conversations are difficult. One stroke survivor put it simply: “I couldn’t talk… she did everything… now she’s like a sister to me.”
This quote reminds us: real connection doesn’t always come from perfect words — it comes from being there, showing up, and trying.
What helps relationships thrive?
The good news is, friendships can survive aphasia — and even grow stronger — when people adjust. Friends who take the time to learn about aphasia, slow down their speech, use gestures or writing, or just stay patient can make a world of difference.
And the benefits go both ways. For people with aphasia, having even just one close friend can lower anxiety, reduce depression, and increase motivation in recovery. It gives people a reason to keep trying — not just to talk, but to live fully.
What can we do?
Talk about friendship in recovery. Therapists, families, and communities should make social connection a real part of the recovery plan — not an afterthought.
Support friends and family too. Sometimes, people want to help but don’t know how. Teaching simple communication tips can help them stay connected without frustration.
Create more spaces for connection. Conversation groups (like those from Aphasia Recovery Connection) or informal meetups can give people a safe place to connect, practice, and build friendships.
In the end, it’s not about perfect speech — it’s about being seen
Healing after a stroke isn’t just about regaining words. It’s about feeling connected to the world again. Friendships give people with aphasia a sense of purpose, joy, and identity. So whether it’s a slow conversation, a shared laugh, or just sitting together in silence — it all matters.
Because in recovery, connection is everything.
Google Research: Project Euphonia and Project Relate
How Google is advancing technology for people with non-standard speech.
Google has a research project called Project Euphonia, which is an initiative started in 2019 to improve speech recognition for individuals with non-standard speech. Project Relate is the first publicly available Android app, developed from the Project Euphonia initiative, that personalizes speech models to better understand an individual's unique speech patterns for easier communication.
Because it’s Google, there are heightened expectations. Before I make any recommendations here, I have a disclaimer: I do not have an Android phone, and this is not available for iPhones (to my knowledge). I have not tested this app out myself. I include a mention of them here because they are at the bleeding edge of technology, and we want to shine a light on anything that has the potential to serve the aphasia community. I did, however, go to the good people of Reddit (an Internet forum) for the scoop. You can review some of the comments yourself here:
r/slp: https://www.reddit.com/r/slp/comments/182c3nr/project_relate/
r/disability: https://www.reddit.com/r/disability/comments/1eqqijv/review_of_project_relate_and_voiceitt/
From the looks of it, there is still quite a bit of work to be done. However, as far as making speech recognition technology work for a wider range of people, including those with speech impairments, Google is probably going to be doing some heavy lifting. Their own AI overview (from Google’s Gemini) summarizes:
Project Relate is a Google Android app designed to help people with non-standard speech, like those with ALS, stuttering, or speech changes from injuries, be better understood. It works by using machine learning to create a personalized speech recognition model based on recordings of the user's unique speech patterns. The app offers features like "Listen" to transcribe speech in real-time, "Repeat" to restate words in a clear synthesized voice, and direct integration with the Google Assistant.
How it works
Personalized Training: Users provide a series of audio prompts by recording at least 500 phrases.
Model Creation: The app uses these recordings to generate a custom speech recognition model tailored to the individual's voice.
User Feedback: The personalized model helps the app understand the user's unique way of speaking.
Key Features
Transcribes the user's speech to text in real-time, allowing them to copy-paste into other apps or have others read what they've said.
Repeat:
Restates what has been said using a clear, computerized voice, which is useful for face-to-face conversations.
Assistant:
Allows users to interact directly with the Google Assistant.
Enhances dictation and long-form text entry accuracy in other Android apps.
Who it's for
Individuals with conditions that affect speech, such as ALS, stuttering, Down’s syndrome, or speech changes due to traumatic brain injury.
How to use it
The app is available on Android devices.
Users need to complete a set of recordings to create their personalized speech model.
Users can enhance their model's accuracy by recording additional phrases over time.
The last thing I’ll note is that Google themselves have not highlighted this as a product designed intentionally or specifically for the unique challenges faced by a person with aphasia. While I do believe there will be incredibly positive, intentional or perhaps unintentional outcomes that could benefit the aphasia community tremendously, there are many unique challenges in this space and ways to approach solving them. At Broca, our mission is to foster understanding and conversation between those with aphasia and their loved ones. With all of the new advances in technology, we have a lot to be optimistic about.
Tips and tricks: How to get the most out of Broca
The magic lies in what you say.
The magic lies in what you say.
If you’ve experimented at all with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any of the other AI products out there, you know they’re smart. Really smart. Suspiciously smart. You also may know that sometimes, they’re wrong. In order to get the best responses out of an LLM like those mentioned above, they need context, or a little history about you and what’s going on. The same is true for Broca AI Speech, which relies on an LLM to generate the responses on the smart cards in the app. As far as personalization goes, it only knows what you tell it. Here are some best practices for getting the most accurate, relevant, and useful responses out of Broca, so that you can get to the bottom of what someone with aphasia is trying to say.
Set the scene
Who, What, Where, When, and Why. The universal checklist for setting the scene and building a complete story, from a simple idea to complex narrative. With Broca, it’s no different. Who’s in the room? What do they want? Where are you, does the day of the week or time matter, and why?
While we’re revisiting concepts from Creative Writing 101, consider parts of speech. In our case, that means starting with nouns. Is there something going on with a person, place, or thing? This will help anchor you in a subject. From there, you can get into verbs and adjectives.
When you open the app and initiate a conversation, start off by giving it a little background. Don’t worry about articulating everything perfectly. Just share where you are (physically, as in “We’re at the kitchen table,” or emotionally, “We’re having a pretty tough day with mobility”) and what problems you’re trying to solve, or what’s going on that day. Chat away. This is going to direct the conversation, and the suggestions on the smart cards.
2. Ask open-ended questions
On a personal note, my mom is coming up on year 4 of her recovery from her stroke, and if I’m being honest, we’ve become pretty reliant upon yes/no questions. Our conversations without Broca are essentially a game of 21 Questions, where all of the questions are yes or no, and we do our best to get to the bottom of what she’s trying to indicate. It feels a bit like a Plinko board of a conversation, but less fun.
While Broca can offer a little more color to a yes or no response, it really shines when you keep your questions more open ended. Ask things like:
How are you today?
How did you sleep?
What do you think about _________?
Why did you _________?
When would you like to _________?
Who do you think _________?
What did you do when _________?
Where did you go today?
What questions do you have about _________?
3. Give it a set of options
At its most basic level, Broca works better for us than the alternatives out there because of how quickly I can prompt it with a set of options. Rather than watching my mom page through a navigation of set icons, I can just ask questions with a few different options, the cards will give her a tidy set of options to choose from, like a menu that I can create on the fly, just by speaking.
For example, I’ll ask something like:
For lunch, would you like Greek food, pizza, Mexican food, a salad, seafood, or something else?
And the cards will show each option on a card, making it quick and easy for her to select one. You can even use letters (for example, A. Greek food, B. pizza, C. Mexican food, etc.) if you want, although it’s not necessary.
4. Add a bio
The bio is a feature that we recently added under your Account Settings. Navigate to your name in the upper lefthand corner, and choose Account Settings from the dropdown. From there, you can add a few details about the people in your life, the places you go often, the things you like to do, and anything else about you that seems generally relevant.
Note: Use the first person (I, my, me) from the perspective of the person who has aphasia (My name is ___________, and I am ___________.)
You can edit and revise this as much as you like. The stakes are low here—experiment with it, and see how it personalizes the cards in the experience.
Hopefully this helps you experience Broca as its intended. As always, reach out to us if you have any feedback or issues. It’s very early in our journey, and you can help shape this product into something that really works for you and your family.
User experience and product design: Add a bio to personalize the cards
Add a bio to give it context about your life, and the suggestions will be smarter.
If you have any experience with AAC apps, you know personalization makes all the difference. A grid of generic words or auto phrases can only help so much—we needed something that was personalized to us, with names of grandkids, their ages, schools, and sports teams, local restaurants and foods we like, doctors, and all of the little details that make for richer conversations with family and friends.
From a design perspective, there are a lot of ways to create an experience that retains individual details and personalizes the suggestions. Lots more to come here. For our first iteration, we created an editable bio under Account Settings.
To personalize your Broca experience, go to your username in the upper lefthand corner and select Account Settings.
Your Personal Bio is an open-ended text box for you to add whatever detail you like. In our example, we’ve included information about family members and spouses, grandkids, work and coworkers, doctors, our city, and some favorite restaurants.
Remember to hit the Save Changes button when you’re done. Edit, add, or remove details from your bio anytime. Your bio is only visible to you.
The details you include here will help give the experience context. The next time you start a conversation, if a topic comes up that references some of the people, places, or things in your bio, the suggestions on the cards should reflect that. Update and personalize this experience as new life events come up, and make changes anytime.
To help you get started, here are some details we’ve included to personalize our own Broca account:
Important people in our life: Family members, friends, caregivers, speech language pathologists, doctors
Pets
Office: Coworkers
Places: Restaurants, doctor’s offices, hair salon, dentist, massage therapist, physical therapist office
Things we like to do
Education and career background
Now when we ask Broca something about the people in our lives, it has personalized suggestions based on the context we’ve added to the bio.
New feature release: Emojis ❤️ 🥳 👏
A picture is worth a thousand words.
We heard from multiple people that images and icons would make the experience more user-friendly. Good news, the day is here!
I asked Gemini (Google’s AI) why iconography telegraphs so well for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries, and this was its response:
Iconography works well for brains after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) because it bypasses language-based communication difficulties by relying on visual, emotional, and non-verbal processing. A TBI can damage the brain's circuitry, especially in areas responsible for executive functions like processing speed, attention, and verbal communication. Because iconic communication is simple and direct, it helps circumvent these damaged pathways.
Which comes as no surprise, really. The reason we waited to introduce visual elements into the Broca design was that we were reluctant to complicate the interface with imagery that could quickly become overstimulating and overwhelming.
There’s a principle in design called Jakob’s Law, which states that users spend most of their time on other sites, and that they prefer your site to work the same way as the ones they already know. This design philosophy prioritizes user comfort and convenience over novelty in order to minimize the learning curve and reduce cognitive load.
Basically, familiarity is comfortable. Enter: emojis. The easy shorthand that most people already have some familiarity with. Give it a try, and tell us what features you’d like to see implemented next. ✅
AI and aphasia: How to use AI to help write emails and texts
Let AI add to what you start.
Depending on where you are in your aphasia recovery, you may be able to type a few words. If you’re able to write a few words down, this new feature from Claude (Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT) might help you write by expanding on your words and turning them into fuller sentences for you.
Previously, after typing a few words and generating a message, you’d still have to copy and paste the message into your Gmail, Outlook, or other email provider. Now it’s possible to send your message directly from Claude.
Video and step by step instructions below.
Step 1: Go to Claude.ai and sign up. (Like most digital products, AI products do require you to create an account and sign in with an email address in order to try them out.)
Step 2: Select “Chat with Claude” (not “Code with Claude”), then select the free option from their product lineup.
Step 3 (optional): Toggle off the “Help improve Claude option” for better privacy. Pictured below at the very bottom above the button that says “I understand.”
Step 4: It asks for your name. I used my initials. You can probably change this later in a setting somewhere. Then it asks for a few of your interests, to help “get to know you” better. This is completely optional.
Step 5: Select “I have my own topic”
Step 6: If you don’t want your chat history saved, use the Incognito Ghost in the upper righthand corner. Letting Claude store a memory of your chat history will help make its answers more personalized and unique to you, simply because it will have more context about you over time. However, it’s always good to be mindful about your privacy and online footprint. Totally up to you—it will work either way.
Regular mode, where your conversation history will carry over into each time you chat and make the responses feel more personalized
Incognito mode, chats won’t be saved or stored
Step 7: We’re almost there. At this point, if you’re using your computer, you’re going to need to download the Claude app on your phone and sign in.
To send text from the Claude app to other applications like Messages or Mail, instruct Claude to draft the message, and then tap the message card to open it in your default messaging or email app, where you can review and send it normally. This "one-tap" feature works with your built-in messaging and mail apps, and avoids the need for manual copy-pasting.
Here's how to use the feature:
Open the Claude app: on your iOS or Android device.
Start a new chat: or open an existing one.
Tell Claude what you want to communicate: by drafting a message or email. For example, you could say: "Help me write a text to my daughter about a flight time" or "Draft an email to my friends about dinner plans next week in Scottsdale"
Review the drafted message: in the preview.
Tap the message card: to open your default or supported app.
Review the pre-filled content: in the new app.
Send the message: as you normally would.
Prompt: Help me write a text to my daughter about a flight time
Text entered on the left (“Draft an email to my friends about dinner plans next week in Scottsdale”), AI generated writing on the right.
If you’re on your phone, you’ll see an option to send these messages via text or email, directly from the app. If you’re on a computer, you’ll still need to copy and paste the message into an email using the Copy button in the upper righthand corner of Claude.