By the time Sara Smolley was born, her grandmother was unable to talk to her. She had been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of just 40, which stripped her of much of her motor capabilities.
“More than anything, it was her speech that was impacted,” says Smolley, the co-founder and VP Partnerships of Voiceitt, an Israeli speech recognition platform for people who have non-standard speech.
“Of course, that affected her ability to build a relationship with my brothers and me, as we couldn’t understand what she was saying,” she tells NoCamels.
The AI-powered Voiceitt platform is designed to recognize and translate speech by people with an underlying medical condition, disability or age-related condition that means their speech is hard to understand.
Smolley’s regret over her inability to communicate with her grandmother inspired her to create Voiceitt. And co-founder Danny Weissberg, a veteran software developer, had a similar experience with a very close relative who suddenly lost her ability to communicate vocally after she suffered a stroke.
As a result of their personal experiences, they came to realize that with enough time and close contact, caregivers could indeed understand family members who could not fully use their voices.
Keep reading at nocamels.com.
Voiceitt CTO and Co-founder Stas Tiomkin is a Technion alumnus.
