ATU713 – Spoken with Michael Bond

Hi. I’m Michael Bond, the founder and CEO of Spoken, and 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 Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 713 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on January 24, 2025.

On today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome Michael Bond, founder and CEO of Spoken, and he’s here to tell us about their AAC solution. We also always want to remind you, listeners that you can reach out to us. You got an idea for someone we should have on the show, a question, a comment, really anything at all, please, please, please do reach out. You can send us an email at tech@EastersealsCrossroads.org or call our listener line at 317-721-7124. We always love hearing from you, and some of our best guest ideas come from your requests. Also, if you’re looking for a transcript of today’s show, it’s available at EastersealsTech.com. Those are generously sponsored by INTRAC. Can find out more about INTRAC at IndianaRelay.com. But without any further ado, folks, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

If you’re out there and you’re looking for more great content on assistive technology, head over to our website at EastersealsTech.com. Over at EastersealsTech.com, you can find not just this podcast along with transcripts of it, but also our sister podcast, ATFAQ. ATFAQ is a question and answer show where we do rely on your questions. So be sure if you do have questions about assistive technology, definitely get those over so that maybe we can actually answer those on the show. But there’s so much more than just the podcast there. You can also find links to our YouTube channel where you’ll find tech tips that come out every Monday about different pieces of assistive technology. These short little three to five minute videos will just show you what a piece of technology is, how it works, and how it might benefit an individual with a disability. You can find consumer highlight stories, blog posts, as well as all the services of INDATA and our clinical assistive technology outlined right there on the page.

If you’re looking to find your local Assistive Technology Act here in the United States, you can go to Eastersealstech.com/states and it’ll get you over there and find it. So really for a lot of the things you might need assistive technology-wise, check us out at Eastersealstech.com. For more shows like this, for videos, for blog posts, for consumer stories, heck, even for pictures of the whole darn team, you can find those over there as well. So thanks as always for listening. And don’t forget if you’re looking for even more content, check us out at Eastersealstech.com.

Listeners, are you heading to the ATIA Conference here at the end of January? Well, we are here from Assistive Technology Update, the INDATA Project and our other assistive technology programs here at Easterseals Crossroads. We’ve got a pretty large group going this year, and we’re very excited to get to learn about all the new assistive technology out there as well as learn from some of the professionals out in the field.

If you happen to be attending ATIA this year, it would be really great to connect. And if you’re looking for some sessions to attend, why don’t you attend one of the ones that we are participating in? On Friday, January 31st, I’ll be presenting with a wonderful Lisa Becker on transition tools for individuals with cognitive impairments in post-secondary education. This presentation will highlight and deep dive into different assistive technologies and accommodations that can assist individuals with cognitive impairments with a transition to higher education and help them to achieve success. We’ll go over all kinds of different stuff from mind mapping to planning to staying focused to writing, reading, and other needs that can affect individuals with all different kinds of cognitive impairments.

If you do attend this training, you’ll come out with some really great ideas, what might be able to assist individuals that you might work with or know as well as maybe some methods to identify and pick out what those might be. Also be presenting on Saturday, February 1st with off-the-shelf accommodations for aging. Brian Norton will be joining me for this presentation, which will go over built-in accessibility features and uses of everyday off-the-shelf electronics and other things and how they can assist individuals as they age in order to live full, active and independent lives.

This presentation is also very excited, honored, and humbled to be chosen as one of the Joy Zabala Spirit Award winners. We’re super excited to be chosen for that award and looking very forward to presenting and talking to everyone down there. So again, if you’re heading to the ATIA Conference and here at the end of the month down in Orlando, Florida, look around for some of our team from Assistive Technology Update from Easterseals Crossroads and from the INDATA Project. And also be sure to attend one of our trainings if you like, and stop by say hi. We look forward to seeing everyone there.

Listeners today, we are super excited to welcome Michael Bond, founder and CEO of Spoken to the show to tell us all about their AAC app and how it can help individuals communicate naturally and with ease. Michael, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about the technology, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah. My name is Michael Bond. I’m the founder and CEO of Spoken, and we make AAC products that help people speak better, whether they have had a stroke or nonverbal autism or any reason that they have trouble speaking through normal means we work on multiple devices to help them communicate better.

Awesome, and I guess let’s start at the very beginning, Michael. Where’d the idea for Spoken come from?

Well, my grandmother suffered a stroke a few years back and part of that was coming out of it with her mind intact, but completely unable to speak through aphasia. And as a technology person, I was … we were instantly like, “Okay, there has to be an app for that. Let’s find out how this works.” And it was interesting to see what was available and how little that had come since. I remember Stephen Hawking in the ’80s talking with a more robot type voice, how little how things had come and seeing some improvements there. From my perspective, as somebody who had shipped multiple technology products before, it’d be like, “Oh, there’s actually some really interesting things happening right now with AI and with speech synthesis. There’s a whole lot of things happening at the same time that we can make some sort of leaps and bounds here fairly quickly.”

And like all good projects, what turned out to be like, “I wonder if I could do this better.” You find out exactly how … why it’s a hard project. Why is this a difficult problem? It’s never the problem that you think it is. And thankfully all those reasons that it’s a difficult problem I think are very interesting ones. There’s linguistic problems involved in it. There’s a lot of deep learning problems. There’s what can we fit on the hardware that people are carrying around in their pockets? How can we do this lower cost? What is the difference between one size fits all for AAC and really targeting in on people’s needs? Luckily, those are all I find difficult problems to be kind of fun. So here we are.

Awesome.

But that was the impetus for it, was just actually having that problem out in the real world, looking for solutions, and just being not happy with what we found.

Nice. And you would be surprised how many of my interviews, how many great just solutions come from that, from being able to find out that there’s a need, and there’s just not anything out there that really matches that need. So I love that that drove you to end up creating Spoken. So I guess I know you said it was an app. I know you said it could work on different devices. Just tell me about Spoken. How does it work?

Yeah, so Spoken both works on your iOS or Android devices as well as computers. But we have focused our AC methods around predicting what the next word possible is when people are speaking. So instead of more board-based methods, which are more memorizing spaces and having predefined phrases, ours are more like given this situation, how can we let people choose their words to put together phrases or sentences as quickly as possible? And a lot of the advances that have been made in AI and that sort of thing in the last few years, we’ve gotten really good at knowing that if someone is in a hospital and says, “I want a … ” they probably are trying to say doctor or nurse. Whereas if they’re in a restaurant and they say, “I want a …” they might be talking about a hamburger.

And the more that we can get people to communicate at a level and at a quickness that can allow them to be a part of life and to be a part of everyday communication, conversation, not just sitting there taking a minute to say a single sentence. The closer that we can get people towards living up for life with that makes a lot of difference.

No, it really does. So it’s able to pretty much learn from the user?

Yes. Not only how people talk, and I don’t know why all my examples are sandwich based, but if you have a-

Must be around lunchtime.

Yeah, exactly. There we go. But if you’re somebody who eats a bologna sandwich for lunch every day, it’s going to know that when you say, “Hey, I’m thinking about … For lunch, I’m thinking …” it’s going to know based on your behavior, based on what you’ve said before. There’s a lot there to learn from. We’re complex people. We say different things, but a lot of us do eat a bologna sandwich for lunch every day, and it’s pretty easy to guess at a certain point.

What we’re trying to do is take in more and more of that information. What time of day is it? Where is the person at? What have they said in the past? How can we learn from them? So that rather than say dumbing everything down to our … what we would guess is the four things that people say, let’s deal with what people actually are saying in real life. What are the names of their family members? What are the names of the things that they interact with? There’s a lot to be learned from there, and we can make AAC work a lot better when we are taking in what the actual … what the user … what their daily life is because we’re all different.

Oh, for sure. And I love that you use all the different kind of inputs. Where they are, what time of day, all those different things. I just think of in a school setting, I know these classes are in the morning, so I know the time and the space, so there might be different questions or different answers that I might need to hurry up and be able to get to a little bit quicker. So I love that. I know that’s the one … that’s not the one thing that people complain about AC. There’s other things in there of course, but one of the things is just the keeping up communication.

Yeah.

The being able to quickly get to things. And I know for a lot of folks, not just because of their disability, I mean even talking about your grandma, it’s frustrating as crud if it takes me forever to get that stuff out. And so I love that it’s able to speed up that process a little bit and like you said, actually give a little richer communication than maybe just one-word answers.

And I think just speaking to that, a lot of AC still get stuck at … It’s a school level. A lot of AC is per children, and I think we’ve dealt with a lot more adults or teenagers who want a richer vocabulary. They want not only something that just interacts with their world, but that can talk about the world in larger, bigger ways. I think when we’ve dealt with people who are held back by speed or depth of communication, I mean, their thoughts on what they want to talk about are just as deep as everybody else’s. And being limited to a smaller palette, I think there were reasons that we had to do that for years, and it’s a fun time to be involved now because the technical limitations that we had aren’t there anymore. These are design and usability limitations now in order to give people tools that are going to help them not just quicker, but also richer and deeper.

Definitely. And you brought this up when we were talking about Stephen Hawking and just the voice. Are there different voices available on Spoken as well?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is the other … We’re coming at a time now, especially if people’s experiences with AC might be from a few years ago or something. A lot of things have happened at the same time, and a lot of this is deep learning AI, things coming to fruition rather quickly. But a lot of this is just the amount of computing power that we’re carrying around in our pockets has really opened up a lot of things, and one of the things is much more natural speech synthesis. Whereas before we’re talking classically these more robotic voices that you would never mistake for a real human voice. Now we’ve got things that can not only sound realistic but can also be more customized towards how people speak. Do they have a deep voice? Do they have a very lilting voice? Is their accent a New Zealand accent?

These things that before nobody would ever ask was like, “Okay, so where’s your new accent?” And now we can say, it’s like, “Oh, it’s right here actually.” And it’s like, “Well, would you like to sound like a mature woman from New Zealand?” Was like, “Here we go.” We have these options now and this realistic … I think one side of that coin is realism, but the other side of that coin is just being able to emote things, actually having emotion in how we’re saying things. I think that’s just become a huge step forward in which we’re not talking in monotones anymore. We’ll actually saying things with some energy in that voice. It’s so cool to hear that kind of thing now, and this was just not happening five years ago.

No, no, definitely, definitely not. It’s amazing the steps and the way it’s really and truly changed. Michael, I got to ask, and you may have kind of mentioned this and maybe I just missed it. I know some AAC is text-based, some is picture based, some is type the words. How does Spoken work with that?

We are mostly text-based. We’re coming in at a level that assumes that the user still has reading and writing abilities. That they’re coming in fairly advanced as far as those things go with minimal problems with reading and writing. We do use icons and iconography. There is some picture based things, but it’s all in the name of speed in letting people pick what they want to say as quickly as possible. But yes, ours is more based towards, I would say, literate users, which is why I think most of our users are more towards the adult end of the spectrum there.

No, and that’s actually great. I know I mentioned school because yeah, that is one of the first things we think of. But I will say that the AAC and AC services for adults is definitely missing. Like you said, there’s just not as much out there-

Yeah, absolutely.

… not as many, many different things. So the fact that I can have a device that I can use as an adult that treats me like an adult. Isn’t made with children in mind, that can also have a voice, that can sound more like my voice would probably sound. A male with a certain kind of accent and everything. Just being able to do that probably really opens up a lot of doors for folks.

We hear a lot about that from adults, but I mean it probably doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the people that we hear from the most that are angry at being treated like children are probably teenagers. There’s something about outgrowing your AAC that might’ve been given to you as a … elementary school. I mean, I don’t know if you hang out with any 17-year-olds, but they’re very, very intent on being treated like adults and having a … This larger world is being open to them. They don’t want to be limited to what they had when they were a child.

No, most definitely. I have a 16-year-old at home. I wouldn’t say I enjoy hanging out with teenagers, but I can remember when I was younger and knew everything too. But yeah, you’re right, that cusp where the world doesn’t see you as an adult, and you sure as heck don’t see yourself as a child. So being able to have something to transition there. And it really just as a society, we unfortunately treat people with disabilities like children throughout most of their lives anyway. So any kind of tool to help society not do that is a really, really good tool. I know there’s some different versions. There’s a base and a premium version available. What are the differences between those?

Well, at some certain level, we don’t want to block anybody off from using our tool, so we have a basic … We start out with a trial where you can get and test out everything, but our base version remains free. That’s some basic predictions. The base functionality of the software. For some of the more advanced voices and learning and storing how you speak and learning from you a bit more, those are some premium features that we ask folks to pay a bit more for, but it’s basically about making sure that this is sustainable and we can keep this going without leaving people out of just the base functionality.

Most definitely. Most definitely. Michael, you probably got tons of these, but can you tell me a story about someone’s experience with Spoken?

Yeah, I … Gosh, I …

If you’ve got a few maybe that … I know that’s a terrible question because I always get put on the spot of that and I’m like, “I don’t know which one to go with.” But if you’ve got a few maybe that stick out to you, maybe that surprised you where you saw it really make a big difference.

Yeah. The ones I remember are always the ones that surprise me. A lot of people use us. Our nonverbal autism and stroke recovery, but also we get some that … The ones that surprise me the most are things where like, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of using that before.” One that sticks out is when Covid did hit, you did have a lot of people who were suddenly on ventilators or recovering from Covid in a way that they couldn’t speak. And again, people don’t consider themselves to be disabled. They have not had to search out for disability tools, and it’s interesting to see people who are suddenly thrown into the situation of how they deal with the tool, and we got multiple things. I’m thinking of one in particular that was saying like, “Hey, I thought I was going to die. This allowed me to speak to my family what I thought may have been my last words to my family. Telling them that I love them, I am right here now.”

This is being written from the future where he did survive. This was amazing. He doesn’t even use Spoken anymore, but for the week or two that he needed it, it was the most important thing in the world to be able to communicate with his family, to be able to … wow, there on such an uncertain thing to be able to communicate and not just … These are exactly the times at which you want richer, deeper communication. You want to be able to use your full vocabulary. You don’t want to be pressing like, “Me love.” You want to be able to express these emotions at the deepest level.

And just hearing things like that, and I think what we get again and again from most of our users are, “Thank you for helping me be back into society, into real world, real life again.” Because I think there’s such a barrier when you have a speech where it does feel like it’s keeping people from taking part in the fullness of life. They don’t even want to go to Starbucks to order their coffee because it’s a complicated thing that they’re going to have to say, and it’s this awful experience. And just being able to open those things back up, that’s what we hear more and more. It’s like, “Thank you for helping me feel like my life is fuller again.” I don’t know. It’s good to hear that.

No, I mean that’s probably why you do it. I’m pretty sure, just steering motivations and why you made it in the first place.

Yep.

I got to guess that it is nice to at least find out that people are using it in the way that you hope they would. And that the reason you did it or the reason that you did it is the reason that they’re using it. So that’s absolutely awesome. Michael, what’s next? What’s next for Spoken? Are you guys working on anything?

Yeah, and we’re working on a couple things, but mostly a lot of it is just trying to keep up with these technological advancements. I mean, a lot of this stuff that has been happening in the last few years. It takes as much as reading academic papers, is it can be fun to me. I know that there’s still a few more steps to bringing crazy advances in AI and having a usable thing that people can actually use, and this is a wonderful time to be like, “Hey, whoa, this thing just got invented. How can we use this to make people’s lives better?”

Our main focus right now on what we’re working for is going back to more board based methods of AAC now and saying, “Okay, how can we in the year 2025 improve these things with AI?” This is still a system that a lot of speech therapists and speech language pathologists are used to. This is still, methods are used in schools. How can we improve this? Or if we were inventing this from scratch today, knowing what we can do today, how would we do this better? How could we use these sort of predictions, not just in the next word sort of thing, but actually making boards and ways of things like that to deal with predictions in the same way where we can give somebody a board that represents what they need at that moment?

We’re also doing a lot of stuff with just more speech to text going the other way. Of saying, “Okay, given what is happening around you right now, what is happening in the room? What did that person just say?” That influencing more of the predictions that we get of like, “Hey, they just asked you how your day was. You should respond in this way.” And speech to text, we’re getting good enough with that, that we can actually just keep the mic on all the time, have the … pick up on what’s happening in the conversation, on what people might want to be saying next. There’s a lot of fun things happening right now.

Oh, I love that. I love that. Guessing what you might want to reply as you hear what it says.

Absolutely.

That’s absolutely an absolutely great tool, and I can’t … Michael, I can’t even fathom how you can possibly keep up because I know artificial intelligence. I don’t remember how long time since Covid, seems irrelevant, but I remember when it first … not first came out, but I guess when ChatGBT and maybe some of those, and it was a little rudimentary, and then just how fast that progressed and how fast all of them just progressed and started learning and getting better. So I do not envy you with having to try to keep up, but at the same time, you make it sound like fun, to really be able to use those tools. And just how do we better use these to help these folks?

It’s a wonderful mix of fun and terrifying.

That’s the best kind though. It keeps life interesting. Right?

Absolutely.

Michael, if our listeners want to find out more about Spoken or maybe try it out for themselves, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Well, they can search for Spoken on the app store or just visit us online at spokenaac.com.

Awesome. We’ll put a link to that up in the show notes so that folks can check that out and go and get that for themselves. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about Spoken, and just all the great ways they’re using these amazing new tools to really help folks with communication in maybe ways they didn’t have before.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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.

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, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.