A Little Open Source Robot For Speech Therapy Practice

Did you know that a session with a speech therapist can cost anywhere from $75 - $400 / hour? Did you know that there has been a consistent rise in the number of children seeing speech therapists and experiencing speech delays?

The economic cost and time burden on single-parent households of children with speech delay and autism who required additional coaching and skills development is rising constantly and can range from $600 - $1,200 / month.

Enter Speaky. Speaky is an open source robot platform developed as a joint project by volunteer developers here in Seattle including myself and Richard Albritton .

Speaky is an open platform based on the Home Assistant project leveraging Piper and Whisper. Our vision is to create a small, low-cost, kid-safe, non-internet connected intelligent robotic core which can be inserted into a wide range of toys and form factors( aka "embodiments").

We are seeking to organize an ecosystem of open source developers, speech therapists, autism skills coaches and hardware developers to produce an open source, safe "useful toy" platform.

On-device LLMs offer us an exciting opportunity to save time and money in speech training, autism skills coaching and ADHD executive function support. Our primary objective, whether or not Speaky is the solution, is to start the conversation around the utility, technology and solutions which are possible now.

Would love to hear from anyone who has interest in participating and contributing to the project. Please leave a comment below.