Tips and tricks: How to get the most out of Broca
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.