It began with one of our own
When former TELUS Digital designer Matt Kubota’s partner Ana was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, we knew we had to help.
The rare autoimmune disorder left Ana temporarily paralyzed and unable to speak. Ana and her caregivers looked to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. But they soon discovered the available options were expensive, bulky, rudimentary or outdated. While Ana recovered, she painstakingly communicated by blinking as caregivers pointed to letters on an alphabet poster.
Matt knew he and the TELUS Digital team could create a better experience for Ana and other AAC users: stroke and trauma survivors, people with MS or ALS, non-verbal individuals with autism, intubated hospital patients and many more. That vision became the Vocable AAC app, a revolutionary augmentative and alternative communication tool, now AI-enabled with the integration of ChatGPT.
It started on a company-wide Innovation Day and eventually became Vocable — a free, conversational AI mobile platform allowing non-verbal users to communicate via subtle head movements and text-to-speech.
Download Vocable today on the App Store or on Google Play.
- $15,000approximate cost of hi-tech speech generating devicesNational Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- 17.9U.S. adults experienced difficulty speaking in the past yearNational Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- 1 in 12children between ages 3–17 are affected by voice, speech, language or swallowing disordersNational Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- 1 in 3stroke survivors experience difficulty speaking, reading or writingStroke Association
Spatial computing | Tracking eye movements
Paralyzed users like Ana, who can’t tap a screen, needed an innovative way to manipulate an AAC device, and the power of the TELUS Digital community proved itself to Matt and the Vocable development team repeatedly.
In the product’s first iteration — “Eye Lasers” — users experienced significant shakiness when trying to control the cursors that tracked their eye and head movements. The robotics expertise of TELUS Digital senior software engineer Chris Stroud unlocked the solution, providing a more stable, precise experience when manipulating elements of any size and on any device. With subtle head movements, users could now control a cursor to type letters or select custom phrases from personalized categories.
Conversational AI meets generative AI
Personalized pattern detection
The integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT allows the app to retain conversational context, enhance predictive pattern detection and bolster semantic understanding of a caregiver’s speech, offering a faster, smoother and more natural conversational experience for today’s AAC users. It's an ideal use case for conversational + generative AI.
Activating listening mode
Vocable is a good listener, too. Through Listening Mode, Vocable understands caregiver speech and context, offering users AI-generated responses that carry the conversation forward. Users or caregivers can quickly and easily activate Listening Mode by tapping the mic icon or saying, “Hey, Vocable.”
ChatGPT is a conversational interface, it's literally made for this. It understands an entire conversation's history, providing better AI-generated responses for the non-verbal user to select.
Design | UX and accessibility considerations
If users have to spend so much of their day interacting with the Vocable app, it’s gotta look good, too, right? Based on feedback from research partners like the assistive technology teams at Duke University and speech-language pathologists, TELUS Digital’s design team identified ways to accomplish exactly that.
Guiding our design work was the principle that high contrast can be so much more than black and white. That’s why Vocable incorporates the strongest ADA compliance through elements like a compelling high-contrast palette and large typography, promising a consistent and aesthetically pleasing experience across devices. Because what’s accessible should also be enjoyable.
When so few hospitals have available technology for the communication-vulnerable, it's exciting that a platform like Vocable exists. Vocable is easy to access and most importantly free.
A growing community
Serving users around the world
Vocable is global. With the help of the localization management platform Crowdin, Vocable became a multilingual product that can serve people speaking more than a dozen different languages around the world.
The next iteration
It’s open-source, too. So any engineer like Chris, designer like Matt or product architect like Kylie can contribute to Vocable — anytime, anywhere. Download the code here: iOS | Android
TELUS Digital believes voice is the future. Vocable is the most powerful voice product we could ever create... I’ve worked at TELUS Digital for more than seven years and this is by far one of the most impactful projects I’ve been on, by any means — and I worked in healthcare IT prior to TELUS Digital.
