ATU704 – Whispp with Joris Castermans

Hi, this is Joris Castermans, and I’m the founder and CEO of Whispp. This is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 704 of the Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on November 22nd, 20204.

On today’s show, we’re super excited to have the founder and CEO of Whispp on. He is here to tell us all about Whispp, and how it can help individuals communicate better. We got a quick story about cellphones in the classroom, and how certain bans may be effecting individuals with disabilities. Don’t forget, listeners, if you ever do want to reach out to us, there’s a couple ways to do that. You can call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. You can also contact us through all our socials, which is @indataproject. Feel free to reach out if you have a question, a comment, or perhaps someone you think we should have on the show. We’re always looking for your suggestions. Some of our best guests do come from your suggestions.

We’re also really excited about some changes coming in the new year here for your AT Program at Easter Seals Crossroads. Including, but not limited to, the return of our Accessibility Minute Podcast. Definitely look for more news on that in the future. As always, listeners, we thank you for listening. If it’s your first time, welcome. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Of course, we cannot thank you enough for giving us a listen here at Assistive Technology Update. But did you know this is not the only podcast that we have? You can also check out our sister show, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. This show comes out once a month, and it features panelists Belva Smith, Brian Norton, and myself, as we try to answer the questions that are plaguing your mind about assistive technology. We gather up all the questions we get during the month from emails, phone calls, and many other means, and then we do our best to answer them.

I got to tell you, folks, believe it or not, we do not know everything. We rely on our listeners a lot, to reach out to us and give us some of those answers, or maybe just talk about their personal experiences and things that have happened to them. If you like Assistive Technology Update, you may very well love Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Again, that’s Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions where you can get your questions about assistive technology answered. Or if you happen to have the answers to some of the questions asked on that show, please, please, please do reach out and let us know so that we can help the community with the answers that they so desperately seek. Much like Assistive Technology Update, you can find Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you prefer to get your podcast. As always, listeners, thank you for listening.

Listeners, here we are, towards the end of November. As you may all know, there was an election here in the United States, so I figured let’s start off with something contentious for today’s show. Not really contentious, we try to stay away from that as much as possible. This is a story from over at K-12 Dive. It’s written by Kara Arundel. It’s called Student Cellphone Limits Raise Concerns Over Disability Rights.

Here in Indiana, and in many other states, this school year brought some changes, especially in cellphone use. Now it’s different state-by-state that might have these rules, but essentially it’s to keep kids off their phones during class time is how most of them are written and the point of it. I know at least here in Indiana, there’s stories about it going pretty well. A lot of teachers talk about when there’s downtime, the students are all talking to each other, as opposed to looking at their phones. They said class participation in discussion, and again, in that in-between time, seems to have really went up, which is a great thing.

Of course, some parents don’t like it. They want to be able to reach their child all day long at school. Or if there’s an emergency, if they have a mental health emergency or something like that. Of course, there are those. Again, we’re not going to actually get into the point of whether they’re a good thing or a bad thing. I am not a teacher. I must say, when I was a student in school, which was many, many years ago, I had a pretty hard time paying attention the whole school day anyway. I can’t even imagine what a cellphone distraction would have done for me and for my education. I’m very glad that cellphones weren’t really readily available, or really I suppose to date myself, even out that much when I was in high school and in the K-12 environment. But today, they are a big part of our daily lives.

But cellphones, tables, and computers do offer amazing accommodations for individuals with disabilities. From time to time, these are probably even written into the IEP. Now, the nice thing about a cellphone, a table, a computer, or something like that is that it doesn’t look any different than what all the other students are using. If all the students are using a tablet, and they’re all using it for their homework, their studies, or whatever, and I am also using a tablet but I’m using an accessible app, or maybe some built-in accessibility features, no one would know. No on in that classroom would have any idea I was using it any differently than them.

This is what the story looks at. It is talking about this tougher stance against student cellphone and device use at school, but talking about how disability rights advocates are warning that you need to consider the civil rights of students with disabilities who require AT to access their learning. I’ll put a link to this story over into the show notes, just so you can go back and read it. But it does talk about some things that we’ve talked on this show before, including the myths about assistive technology brought out by the US Department of Education. It also talks about the importance of writing assistive technology into the IEP. But then, it raises some really good questions.

Just reading from the story here, I’m going to paraphrase. “Would the student be stigmatized or violate health privacy protocols if they were using a device that was prohibited for other students? Will the cellphone ban result in segregation of students who are allowed to use it?” And then, “Will parents be burdened with ensuring that the IEPs met, allowing for the AT where the technology is limited in other ways?” Again, no matter which side you really sit on of should cellphones be allowed in the classroom, should they be limited, should there be no limits on access to it, it’s very important to remember that not every student is the same. Not every student’s going to use a device in the same kind of way. Not everybody’s using the same things on those devices.

It’s always a bit of a worry, especially when these big things happen, that individuals with disabilities will be left out. I wonder what exactly are your thoughts on this? On maybe even cellphone bans in school. But even more importantly, what kind of considerations need to be made to ensure that individuals with disabilities that need these tools are able to use them to help further their education? If you want to read the story for yourself, I’ll put a link to it over in the show notes.

Listeners, make sure that you tune in next week, as we will have our annual holiday gift giving guide. It’s one of those things where, coming out every Friday, we come out on Black Friday every single year. This year, we’re doing it just a little bit differently. We’ve got a big bunch of folks coming from all of our different projects, our clinical assistive technology, our INDATA project, and our Atlas project, to talk about some cool technology that they’ve found, or maybe something that they’re excited about. Do make sure to check us out next week, after you’ve had that big Thanksgiving turkey dinner on Thursday. Tune in on Friday and listen to a big group of our amazing staff as they talk about some of the cool stuff that they’re looking forward to this holiday season.

Listeners, today we are very excited to welcome Joris from Whispp to the show. He’s here to tell us all about how this technology can assist individuals with their communication needs.

Joris, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Before we get into to talking about Whispp and how it can help out, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. My name is Joris Castermans. That’s a Dutch name. I live in Leiden, a beautiful city about 30-minutes drive south from Amsterdam. I started Whispp because I have a stutter myself. Now, I am pretty fluent, but when I was a child I had a more severe stutter. Yeah. At the starting point, to be honest, of Whispp, 40, 45 years ago, when I was about five, that my stutter was there to stay. Yeah.

That was based on the fact that people who stutter severely, when they whisper they are fluent. That’s something that I came up about six years ago now. That’s a really strange mechanism. It’s a neurological phenomenon. When you whisper, you don’t use your vocal cords. With that, the speech system changes, the neurology of the speech system changes. Then you are much, much more fluent.

Then, the idea was born to develop AI that converts this whisper speech into a clear and natural voice in realtime, so you could have relaxed and fluent phone calls. That’s where we are now, six years fast-forward.

That is so cool. I would have never known. I’ve just seen you present before, which is the only reason I would have ever thought or even known that whispering is so much different than just speaking.

True.

It’s not something you would take, because you’d really just think it’s speaking quieter. But yeah, the fact that you don’t even use the vocal cords, that it makes it easier for folks to communicate, be it with a stutter, with some other needs, and we’ll get into that a little bit.

I guess, you started us off a little bit. But, Joris, dig into what exactly is Whispp?

Yeah. Probably you know speech technology like it is now. Speech recognition, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech. But what we do, we convert this whispered speech or vocal cord impaired speech, so for people with throat cancer, vocal cord paralysis, spasmodic dysphonia, we convert that in realtime so there’s no noticeable latency of the conversion. That’s a big, big difference when compared to the current technologies. For a natural conversation, the flow of the conversation is so important. That’s why we are pretty unique in this domain.

Most definitely, most definitely. You brought up a few folks. Folks with a stutter, folks with maybe a vocal cord injury. Who else might be a good candidate to benefit from using Whispp?

Yeah. I think it’s important to know what we not can. The limitations are there that, when people have a degraded articulation. For example, people with ALS, for example, who have troubles with articulating, we can’t fix that. A rule of thumb is that when you are close to the mouth of the potential user, and you can understand that person, then Whispp is able to help.

Oh, okay. Very cool, very cool. You talked about how the AI fills in the blanks and everything. Where would I use Whispp? Would I use this for distance communication, for face-to-face? Or in what situations would I be able to benefit from using Whispp?

Yeah, that’s a good question. Currently, you can download the mobile app. Currently, you are able to make phone calls with it. You can also record voice messages with it. You can share them via your preferred social media. We will be launching, probably at the begin of next year, a live conversations mode.

People who, for example, lost their voice due to throat cancer, they have a lot of difficulties with social events with lot of noise. They just are not able to express themselves. The idea there is that you connect your smartphone with a Bluetooth speaker, you press the button within the Whispp app, and then you can use the microphone of the smartphone, and you are clearly audible for your conversational partner.

Nice. That’s very cool. Joris, if I’m on a phone call and everything, and I can whisper in. The person on the other line, again, the conversation keeps flowing. What is the voice like that they hear? Is it close to my personal voice? Is it an AI generated voice? How does that work, or are there different options available for folks?

Yeah, that’s a good question. We have pre-set voices, so people can choose from a list of voices. They can choose the one they like the best. For people who have recordings from the past, from their past healthy voice, we can recreate their personal voice. We need about two minutes of clean recordings. With that, we are able to make the conversion sound like you did in the past.

I think there’s a really nice example of this on our website, whispp.com. Whispp, W-H-I-S-P-P.com. You can see a person where we created his personal voice. He hears this for the first time together with his wife. You can imagine the impact and the emotional impact of that, to be able to use your own personal voice, because a lot of your identity is tied to that.

Oh, for sure. I love that you said about two minutes of recording. I just remember when, oh, when voice banking started and everything, you needed so much, so much.

Exactly.

I love that the artificial intelligence has come to the point where it can build that model off something that a lot of folks, when they used to have a strong voice, probably have somewhere.

Yeah.

Probably have that kind of information, so that’s awesome.

That’s true. But we learned that many people don’t.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Then they say, “I have my voicemail message.” Yeah. That’s 10-seconds, that’s slightly too short and the quality is important. We had people who brought video cassettes-

Oh, no.

To digitize them. Yeah. Certainly, for people who got sick a long time ago, they don’t have their recordings on their smartphone. That’s, indeed, for people who are listening now and you have a healthy voice, be aware of the fact it can happen. Chance are really small, but please bank your voice. Make recordings. Make 10, 20 minutes of recordings in a clean environment without background noise. Just read the paper, and read it in a way with a lot of dynamics. Not a dull voice, but read it in a dynamic way.

Yeah, it can make a big difference. Of course, you hope that these kind of things don’t happen, but they happen every day.

Exactly.

It can happen to folks when you’re not expecting. An accident, injury, illness. So many, many different things can happen. Even with using a digitized voice that isn’t one’s own, being able to have that realtime communication, I’m not typing something and waiting for it to come out, I’m not doing anything like that, I’m actually speaking, I’m sure still makes an amazing difference in folks being able to communicate.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. True.

Joris, what languages does this currently support?

Yeah. That’s the nice thing that our AI, it’s an audio-to-audio based AI. Our AI is language agnostic.

Nice.

With that, it’s massively scalable worldwide. We are in contact with the Japanese government. We are in contact with an Indian governmental organization. We sell across Europe, in the States. What you can do, the AI model is language independent. But to tweak the accent, you can choose your language.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

Okay. Very, very cool. Joris, you probably have a ton of these, but could you tell me a story about someone’s experience using Whispp and how it was able to help them out?

Yeah. The most emotional things are, in many cases, little things. Having a lady telling about that she was able to go to the restaurant again with her husband. Yeah, those are such beautiful moments to hear about that.

Nice. Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s just tons of them out there. I can sit here and think of so many folks that it could benefit and help out. If our listeners want to find out more, or even download Whispp for themselves, what’s a good way to do that?

Yeah. You can read more on our website, it’s whispp.com. So, W-H-I-S-P-P.com. You can also find Whispp in both the App Store and Google Play.

It’s good to know that the Whispp app can be downloaded for free. The voice messages are for free. In the trial, you have 30 minutes to try out the phone and video calls. Please, do so. When you decide to keep on using Whispp, then it’s based on a subscription model. It starts from 19.99, and you have about two hours a month to make calls with Whispp.

Yeah. That’s actually also where we have YouTube tutorial videos. It’s actually really, really, really simple because we made it look like your regular phone application. You go to your contacts in the app, you can dial a number, and that’s it.

Nice.

It’s really, really simple.

Nice. I guess that brings up another question. I know I can go in the app in order to call someone going out. Now, if somebody calls me, how would that work? Would they call into the Whispp app, would I open the phone call? How does that user experience look like on that side?

Yeah, that’s a good question. Currently, you are able to receive inbound calls when the other person downloads the Whispp app as well.

Okay.

For example, family and friends, you can invite them to download the app. For them, it’s free. They can reach out to you via Whispp, and you can also make video calls with it. You can compare it with a platform like What’s App. You’re not able to call someone with your regular phone on their What’s App. On both ends, you need the mobile app, the Whispp app. But the user, him or herself, the primary let’s say patient user, he or she can make phone calls to each phone number, a mobile number, landlines, because we connect the digital, the VOIP call, to a trunking service so you can connect with the telephony network.

Nice, nice. That’s great, because yeah, it even gives you the added benefit of only really friends and family, and folks that you give permission to use that can even get a hold of you. No more spam calls or having to worry about those things.

Yeah, yeah.

An unseen benefit.

Yeah. Yeah. But you can make calls with the restaurant, or with the hospital, or with someone who you are not speaking that much.

Sure.

You can just dial or select that specific contact in your contacts list, and you are able to make the phone call from the Whispp app to that mobile or landline.

Nice, nice. Joris, just to make sure, because we glazed over it just a little bit. You said you can do video calls through there, too. Is that correct?

Yeah. Currently, within the iOS app, you are able to make video calls. Soon, we will also be launching a desktop application. It’s a virtual microphone, you could call it. It’s a little piece of software, you install it on your laptop. From there on, it picks up the audio from the microphone, the physical microphone, and then it converts it with the AI on the laptop, and then sends it through to the preferred platform. It’s also, [inaudible 00:24:17]. Sometimes you use Zoom, sometimes you use Teams. It’s platform-agnostic. It’s based on Windows and your Windows laptop.

Excellent. Yeah, it works on the different systems in different languages. I like that you made it accessible that way to folks. Not just in one region, one culture, or on one device. It’s available pretty much anywhere that they might want to use it. I’m sure, especially for folks with this need or where this can benefit, it’s probably just an absolute game-changer, especially with communication.

Yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. Well, it is very, very cool. I do recommend listeners definitely go check it out, and see how it can help. I’m sure you probably have somebody that you’re already thinking about that maybe it could benefit. Definitely do check it out. We’ll put links down in the show notes to everything that Joris mentioned today.

Joris, thank you so much for coming on the show, and telling us all about Whispp, and all the great things it can do.

Yeah. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. Yeah. More than willing to travel to the US. We’re busy with closing partnerships further. We’re looking into the application of the telephony relay domain to have Whispp being a TRS application, so to be continued.

Excellent, excellent. When all those things change, and come up, and everything, we’ll have you back on and talk a little bit of an update about some of the awesome things going on. Thank you again.

Let’s do that for sure.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own, and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easter Seals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.