ATU720 – Talking Keyboards with Samantha Hyman

Hi, this is Samantha Hyman, and I’m the director of marketing at Talking Keyboards, 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 720 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on March 14th, 2025.

On today’s show, we are excited to be joined by Samantha Hyman, director of marketing for Talking Keyboards, as she joins us to talk about their solution that can help individuals with communication needs. We’ve also got a story about an accessible hotel in West Virginia that’s being used as a proving grounds for new assistive technology and accessibility product in the hospitality industry. Let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Folks, 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. But I got to tell you folks, believe it or not, we do not know everything. So, 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.

So, if you like Assistive Technology Update, you may very well love Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Again, it’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. And as always, listeners, thank you for listening.

Folks, I got to let you know that coming up in a few weeks, we’re very excited to do our, I think, first ever crossover episode. We’ll be partnering up with the amazing folks from the IMPACT Center at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Rehabilitation, Science, and Technology as we take turns interviewing the same guest. So for folks who don’t know, the IMPACT Center offers so many different services that can really assist. They have an MMOC, a massive open online course, IMPACT Bootcamp, IMPACT Startup, IMPACT Accelerant, readiness assessment tools, so many other things. But really, and the whole reason that we’re partnering with them is they also have the IMPACT Tech Podcast. We’ll put a link down in the show notes so that you can go over and check out the IMPACT Center, and also get access to their podcast.

But we’re really looking forward to this, but I just wanted to let you know that here in a few weeks, you will hear not just myself, but also an amazing host from the IMPACT Center. So, just keep an eye out for that crossover show as it comes out here in just a few weeks.

Folks, our story today, it comes from Lootpress and it’s written by Austin Sims. It’s titled First-of-Its-Kind Accessibility Lab Brings Assistive Technology to the Hospitality Industry. This comes out of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and it talks about something called the Accessibility Lab or just The Lab. And it’s a collaboration between the Schoolhouse Hotel, TravelAbility and Samaritan Partners. And it’s there to allow startups to refine innovations in an operational hotel, ensuring that accessibility solutions are both effective and practical. This talks about the Schoolhouse Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It says, it’s a 1912 high school that’s been repurposed in order to feature 30 adaptive guest rooms and inclusive event spaces designed for accessibility. It says here, pretty soon, it also has an upcoming expansion that’ll include 85 additional rooms, a spa, a microdistillery, and retail space. And really, the whole idea behind this is to have a real-world testing area where startups that are working on different assistive technologies can try out their products in an operational hospitality setting.

And this is made so that the inventors, the folks that are making this assistive technology, can use it with real travelers in order to validate whether it’s actually helpful or important before it actually even reaches the market. As I said at the beginning, this is a partnership. So it’s also a partnership between TravelAbility, which it says here, is a leader in accessible tourism. And then also, with Samaritan Partners, which is a social IMPACT venture fund that helps support early stage companies focused on disability services.

So I love this kind of partnership because this is really and truly something that can help so many different people in so many different ways. And I don’t just mean individuals with disabilities. This also helps the folks that are making different assistive technologies get proof of concept, see how is this really going to work in the real world? How would this work in an actual hotel and really get to test it out? And not just test out whether it works, but test out, is it really useful? Is it really going to help? Is it really going to be something important that will help individuals with disabilities with accessible hotel rooms?

It also helps the hotel industry as they look and are able to find out what kind of accommodations can we build into our hotel rooms to make them more accessible for not just individuals with disabilities, but also individuals without disabilities, and really, just everyone all the way around. I’ll put a link to this down in the show notes, so that you can go over to Lootpress yourself and find out a little bit more about the story. But a super cool idea for the accessibility lab at the Schoolhouse Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. We can’t wait to see where it all goes.

Listeners, today, we’re excited to welcome Samantha Hyman from Talking Keyboards, to the show, to tell us all about their simple and easy to use alternative communication device that allows the user to type what they want to say and have it projected out to assist with communication in different settings. Samantha, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Sure. My background since COVID has been I would say, marketing in a lot of different startups. I started working with a parent company, TechSpeak, that’s affiliated with Talking Keyboards around 2022. And we decided to branch it off and we spun it out into Talking Keyboards. So that’s been my area for the past couple of years.

Nice. Well, on to Talking Keyboards, I guess let’s start at the beginning. When was it started and why?

Sure. So it gets confusing just because of the parent company, so I’m going to skip over the start because it’s a totally different entity, but Talking Keyboards, I would say is about a year and a half old. We were selling the technology for the past, I don’t know, since 2012, under a different umbrella. It was much more… How would I say it? It wasn’t marketed. It was just out there and people were buying it by finding it on Google. It’s been in the stratosphere since 2012, again, under a different name and things like that. And since Talking Keyboards started a year and a half ago, it’s been doing super well and we’ve been planting our seed all over the internet and putting ourselves in things like the ATIA and seeing really great success over the past year and a half.

Awesome, awesome. Well, I guess what all the listeners want to know, we don’t want to beat around about it, what is Talking Keyboards?

Sure. So basically, I’ll talk about why it got started. The parent company does a lot with text to speech and we noticed there was a need for cost-effective AAC devices. So that was again, sort of why the infancy of it all got started. We have our proprietary text to speech speaker, which comes with the talking keyboard. So it’s just a little speaker inside a box, and then a keyboard. We have a few different models. We have a large key for low eyesight. It’s bigger than a MacBook keyboard. Then we have one that’s probably about the MacBook size, what you’re used to, a small keyboard and that’s the standard key. And then we have the dual key model, which includes a standard key, as well as a mini. So something that’s the size of your hand. And all three, when you type, it talks.

And the reason this was created was, “Hey, somebody is a postop patient. Their wife or husband leaves for the day and they can’t make a phone call.” Right? They can’t answer the phone. They don’t know how to use an app device. They don’t know whether they’re elderly or whatever that might be. And the need for this just is out there and it’s never existed and it’s a low-cost device. And when people find out about it, they’re like, “This is life-changing. I can answer the phone when my husband leaves.” And that’s been huge. So basically, it’s a real-time text to speech tool.

Oh, definitely. I like the way that you bring up just the ease of use. I know when we get into AAC sometimes, it’s very deep, very complex, and I’m sure some folks need that. So this is for folks who maybe are a little older, or like you said, kind of postop or maybe have lost the ability to speak later in life.

Yeah. We always said that it was for that kind… That’s been our group and what we’ve seen, but over the years, it’s come up about, “Oh, is this a device for K through 12? Is this a device for younger individuals?” And we’ve always shied away from it. So the answer is yes, but when we went to ATIA recently, and we’ve been getting these phone calls going, “This sounds great for an SLP.” A speech language pathologist will call us and go, “This sounds great as a tool for somebody I’m working with.” And we’re like, “Really?” So what we did is we went to ATIA and we put out a model to talk to SLPs and educators about, that was a really large keyboard, color coded, just a much more fun looking model for younger. And they were like, “This would be an amazing tool for my patients as a learning tool in letter mode.

So we actually have that coming out now for a phonetic mode, as well as standard speech mode that we always have sold for the K through 12 community. So that’ll be the Talking Keyboard’s K-12 model. So if a student has selective mutism, they can use it how it was meant to be used, which is the word mode, typing and speaking. If an SLP is looking to educate their kids and learn to type, they type A, it’ll say, “Ah,” Or F will say, “Fa.” So we found that with that age group, that they’re looking for a tool that doesn’t have a screen because no one wants screens anymore. It’s like we’re going back in time. And this solves a lot of needs for the education community. So that’s coming out this month as well.

Oh, awesome. That’ll be super helpful. Because yeah, I know just building language and everything can be a challenge a little bit. And for some folks, just using the keyboard, it’s so… I don’t want to say simple, because I know so much goes on behind the scenes to make it all work.

Oh, yeah.

But at the same time, yeah, just typing a word and hitting enter and having that word come out is so intuitive, I guess, for those.

Yeah. They’re using it right now, and it goes to a computer and they go, “We don’t want it to.” Right? Or there’s a screen and it’s an $8,000 piece of technology, and they’re like, “We’re just trying to have this kid speak.” It’s $559. So that part is really helpful. And regarding the no screen mode, which is something that we get asked all the time, why doesn’t this have a screen? It quadruples the price. The whole point of this was to just keep it simple and keep it cost-effective. And the second you add a screen, that changes the whole purpose of this.

So we added letter mode so that if someone is trying to type in, H-E-L-L-O, enter, it’ll talk to that person if they need that. Again, that’s a new feature from last month, which is what the educators were like, “Ah, this is amazing. Let’s just also do it in phonetic mode.” Most people do not use letter mode. They use just word mode because they’re typing long sentences. And another thing is preset phrases is a huge tool for folks. If you’re going to be always saying the same thing, you can save 30 different phrases, multi-language, male and female voices, changing the speed if it’s an elderly. So all of that customization is embedded into the keyboard, which is really helpful for now young and old, which was kind of back to your original question.

No, I love that. I love how I can say phrases, I can do all that, but also, it lends itself to the user. I’m not limited on what I can say. I’m not limited on what I can talk about. Anything I can type, I can get out.

Yeah. The one thing, not to make it a joke, but the educators were like, “This will be amazing, but we really need you to kill the swear words.” So that’s something we’re working on too, because the kids could… Look, they did it with keyboards, I mean, calculators back in the day. Kids like to do that. And so, we’re working on that and pre-toggling that feature on and off for educators. So it can’t be a funny tool, right? It’s a real learning tool.

It might get them to use it more. I’m just saying.

I know. They’re like, “This kid I’m working with won’t speak, but they’ll type, but I don’t want them to look at a screen, and things like that.” So we’re here and we’re listening to what people need, and that’s I think, a rare thing right now. So it’s been really nice to get the feedback from the SLPs. What do they need? So that’s been great.

That’s awesome. So you mentioned that I can save preset phrases, and then you said it also has a couple different voices and languages. Can you tell us what those are?

Sure. Right now, it’s male and female. So you can toggle that on and off. And then depending on who is using it, and you can change the speed of the voice with the arrow keys up and down. Right? Do you want to talk really fast? If you type really fast, which everybody at ATIA recently tried to break it, going, “If I type as fast as humanly possible, is it going to catch it?” And it does. So any speed and you hit enter, and then it’ll speak your sentence. And then right now, English and Spanish are integrated, as well as French. We have tons of different languages coming out. They’re there, but we haven’t gone global yet. But it is multi-language, which is really helpful for some folks as well.

Definitely, definitely. I can see how that could be helpful for all kinds of users. So you mentioned of course, face-to-face and kids. What other kinds of settings would Talking Keyboards be helpful with?

Yeah. The dual key right now has been a really popular model, just in terms of the portability of it. Because it’s all wireless and you can leave your standard key at home. And then you want to go to dinner with your dad. You can’t really understand what he’s saying, so he brings the mini in his hand, and then he sets the little speaker on the table and he can type and respond, and you can clearly hear what they’re saying.

Those situations, instead of bringing a chunky device to dinner, is really nice so that you can have a conversation and really understand what the other person is saying. So the dual key has been a really great tool. And again, for the kids, we’re understanding for those with selective mutism, that they love to add that mini keyboard into the features. Can they bring it to the classroom and answer questions with it? So that’s something that we’re looking into as well, just as an add-on. But it’s answering the phone, it’s just the day-to-day tasks where somebody… I’m old school. I don’t love my app for everything. Having just a device to be able to answer and speak, it doesn’t really exist. And that’s crazy. And some people don’t have the ability to go out and buy an $8,600 device just for a postop solution. Right? So that’s again, the use cases for simple speaking communication needs, short-term, long-term, it depends, but it’s changed a lot of people’s lives.

Yeah, I’m sure that it has. Do you have a story that comes to mind about the talking keyboard being able to change someone’s life?

Right now, where we’re putting this out is there’s the big companies, which you know what they are. They work directly with the hospitals and organizations and all sorts of things. We’re putting this out on Amazon. We’re trying to make this accessible. And I didn’t even think that that would be a story. I didn’t think people would go on and buy something so expensive, more than 19.99 diapers, but it’s been a huge success.

There’s people who are searching for this on the internet all the time, like talking devices. So that’s been really nice knowing, that the need is there. And Joe Schmo is looking for this tool and we’re there because I wouldn’t know how to find it if I had a recent surgery. Right? And every time we get a phone call to the office and someone is using the device and they hit the F1 key, which is preset that says, “Please be patient while I type responses,” or F2 where it says, “I’m using this device, please be patient,” again, they can change all these. They’re using it. So every story is different. The emails we get are amazing. It’s just that it’s changing people’s lives and they’re using the device for what it was used for, and that’s just really nice.

No, it’s great. I could see how it could help a lot of folks with really, a lot of different kinds of communication challenges. Even folks who may be deaf or hard of hearing, I could see how it could help in some situations, even be able to communicate a little bit more and open up some doors in some different ways. So you’ve mentioned that you got some new stuff coming. So that’s the stuff to work with K-12, different voices or different languages and things like that. When are these coming down the pipeline?

Yep. The Talking Keyboards K-12 model is on our website right now. So folks can get an early discount if they sign up. And that’s all, again, on talkingkeyboards.com. That’s coming out in March. So we’re here. It’s coming this month. Yeah. And we’re working on a DME level product for hospitals. That, I can’t touch, Sean, too much right now. That’s coming out in the late spring. But I think we’re just trying to hit all the different areas when people ask, do we have it? We have the technology, we just need the time to build it. But the K-12 model, I’m really excited about, just because I’m learning much more about the SLP market and the anti-screen movement. And when everyone played with our demo at ATIA, they were like, “This is great. This will be a great thing to have in our schools, the fun colors and things like that, and the phonetic mode.” And I think over time, we’re going to be integrating a lot more as we talk to the educators into the future models. So yeah, that’ll be great. Fingers crossed.

That’s awesome. And I never even thought about the hospitals and DME. But yeah, if you’re on a breathing tube or something like that, you might very well be coherent and awake enough to be able to communicate, but good luck talking with that thing in. So I could see how that could be super helpful to be able to communicate with staff, with doctors, with everybody else, and actually be able to express your needs, concerns or just anything that you might want to say. So that’s super, super helpful. It never even crossed my mind.

Right. You don’t necessarily want to use an iPhone app while you’re sitting there in recovery. Right? You’d rather type in H-E-L-L-O, or no, or things like that. It’s a very easy device. So that’s again, we’ve gotten the phone calls from the loved ones of the recovery patients, but the hospitals aren’t really too aware of us yet. So that’s again, the next market we’re going to plug ourselves into, because we’re hoping that it helps a lot of people. That’s the goal of all of this.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. There’s no learning curve. If you can type however you type, whether you are a touch typist and doing it quick or just hunting and pecking, that’s all you do. There’s so much more you can do. You can add of course, the phrases and everything else, but I mean, out of the box, you’re ready to go.

Yeah. And I think that it’s funny, like 15 years ago, we all learned cursive or 30 years ago, and they removed cursive from the curriculums. And the educators were saying, “It’s typing now. We teach them to type and to write, but there’s no cursive.” And a lot of people need to hear back what they’re typing and they need to feel the keys. And they’re like, “This is a tool to literally learn, A means Ah, or A means A.” And being able to hear that, nothing like that exists for the kids. So it’s a tool in that way too.

Well, and I love how it’s expanding and being used in new ways as well. So that is awesome. And it sounds like you guys are doing it right, listening to users and other cases and being like, “Oh yeah, we can work into that and that can definitely work in there.”

Right.

Yeah.

I think it’s sometimes you ignore the customer and it’s like, right now, all we’re doing is going, “What does everybody need? How can we help?” So it’s been really nice meeting people and talking to folks and learning about what everyone’s needs are.

Yeah. And it’s always fun to find out how someone is using the device and just being like, “Well, I never thought about that.” That’s amazing that it can fit in there and be used in that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Samantha, you mentioned this a little bit-

ATIA was super helpful.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

So that’s good.

Yeah. You get all those folks together, it’s just amazing. And I love getting to go and just find out there’s so many people that do this kind of work and work in these fields, and just being able to see what they’ve learned, what they know and learn from their experiences. Yeah, it’s always amazing. It’s about a three-month high usually, coming back. It’s about that long to catch up from being gone too, but…

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, no, it’s all good.

Samantha, you mentioned this, but can you just let our listeners know what’s the best way for them to find out more?

Yeah, sure. So Talking Keyboards right now, I would say, go to the website, talkingkeyboards.com. We’re also on social media under Talking Keyboards with an S. if you want to learn more, it shows where we’re sold. So a variety of folks right now sell our product, but you can buy direct on our website, Amazon, if that’s preferred because your stuff is saved there. Rehabmart, we work with AliMed, and there’s lots of documentation on our website for SLPs. How do you submit to insurance? What codes are we under? Which is a whole section for people. Why is the K-12 unit helpful? There’s a whole documentation area. And again, why is this helpful over picture based devices? Poke around the website, go read about it.

Awesome. We’ll put that down in the show notes, so folks can easily find it. Well, Samantha, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us all about Talking Keyboards and the great work that you all do and letting us learn all about it.

Thank you for the great work you do. So thank you very much.

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 at INDATA Project. 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 Nicole 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.