ATU759 – VoiceItt and Babel with Dr. Rachel Levy

Hi, this is Dr. Rachel Levy, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of The Babel Group, as well as the customer success manager at Voiceitt. 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 759 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on December 12th, 2025. On today’s show we are super excited to welcome Dr. Rachel Levy back to the show, and she’s been on here before to talk about Voiceitt. She’s here to tell us about all kinds of updates with the software and the amazing things that it can do, and to tell us all about The Babel Group.

Listeners, we always love to hear from you. So don’t forget, give us a call at (317) 721-7124, or shoot us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. You’ve got an idea for a guest, a question, a comment, or anything else you’d like to share with us? Please do reach out. But for now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Today, listeners, we are super excited to welcome back Dr. Rachel Levy. She’s been on here before to tell us about Voiceitt, but it has been a long time. There are a lot of changes, so we are thankful to have her back to share some of these exciting updates, and also to tell us about The Babel Group and the great work that they are doing as well.

Rachel, thank you so much for coming back to the show.

Thank you so much for having me again.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about the changes and all the new stuff. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. Yes, so I am a speech language pathologist, trained for… I mean, worked clinically for about 18 years. Went back to school, got my doctorate, worked as the customer success manager at Voiceitt, still do, and about a year ago started a company called The Babel Group. And here we are.

Awesome, awesome. We’re going to get into The Babel Group here in a little bit, but I think we should start off with Voiceitt. For listeners who haven’t heard you on here before or don’t know anything about it, what is it?

Voiceitt is a speech recognition technology for people with impaired speech. It basically converts speech that’s hard to understand into text and automated speech.

Awesome, awesome.

As we talk about abnormal speech or speech that’s hard to understand, what kind of speeches are we talking about? Or can you give us some examples?

Sure, so some diagnoses can affect people’s speech. Sometimes someone can have a degenerative disease or a stroke, or they were born with cerebral palsy or have Parkinson’s. Various different disorders can affect someone’s speech.

The diagnosis for someone who has speech that’s hard to understand that typically is best understood by Voiceitt is called dysarthria. Dysarthria, it’s a motor speech disorder. It is a speech disorder that affects the musculature of the speech muscles basically.

Okay, very cool.

I know you said that it can work for speech-to-text or even for to be able to change your voice so that you’re able to do it. Where all can Voiceitt be utilized?

Sure.

Are you asking specifically the type of technology it’s utilized on, or what scenarios it’s used on?

I guess a little bit of both.

Okay, so Voiceitt is a web-based application, which means that all you need to do is open up a website, sign in, and be able to use it. That also means it’s quite versatile because you can use it on many different devices in different situations.

We have different people. We have some customers use it strictly for speech-to-text, and they’ll use our Chrome extension to dictate text into their Google Docs or Google Slides or social media. Some people will use it only for speech-to-speech, and they’ll have it to work and communicate out in the community. They’re using it to, let’s say, order a coffee or buy some museum tickets, for example.

Nice. I can see how it could help on the job and in so many different things. I know that folks with atypical speech, that’s always been a frustration to be able to do the voice-to-text, or even to be able to be understood out in situations. It always seems like the family members of those closest can understand or decipher what individuals are trying to say, but being able to actually independently do that out there is amazing.

Well, we were talking before the show, the last time you were on Voiceitt was in beta, so it is been quite a while. Can you tell us what’s new with Voiceitt?

Oh, wow. Yeah, so much. Where to begin?

Well, one of the major things that have changed is that at the time when we were in beta, we actually required 1,000 phrases for individuals to train and use Voiceitt. And now we’ve gotten it down to 50. If you want to try Voiceitt, the barrier’s quite low. 50 phrases is not a lot.

We also have the option of choosing the types of phrases that are best suited to you. Last time we only had one set of phrases, and they were five to six words in length. If you need something shorter, we have medium length, which is three to four words, and we have even shorter, which is one to two. And then if the language is too difficult, we even have a phrase set that’s controlled for the language difficulty. That’s our simple language phrase set.

And then even if that’s hard for you, you can actually input your own words and train it that way.

Oh, nice. I mean, that just makes it so much more accommodating for folks of all different kinds of needs and abilities. That’s excellent.

Yes, exactly.

The other thing is that we have integrations. We have integrations with Teams, Zoom, WebEx for live transcriptions during video calls so you actually get accessible captions. People with impaired speech know the frustration of trying to use the standard captions that exist in the existing video platforms, and now they can use Voiceitt to get those captions. We’re giving them much better accuracy.

In addition to that, we have our Chrome extension, which I mentioned earlier, that allows individuals to dictate texts directly into websites. It works on most websites. We can’t say all, but we’re always happy to hear from our customers and say, “Well hey, it doesn’t really work so well on this website and I use it a lot. Can you try to figure it out?”

We always listen to our customers and try to make improvements to make sure that our tool is as usable and accessible as possible.

That’s super cool.

Talking about customers and everything, could you share a few stories about individuals’ experiences using Voiceitt and how was able to help them?

Yes, so I want to share about Warren. He’s a high schooler. He was born with cerebral palsy. He uses a wheelchair. He can type, but it’s quite slow when he tries to type. Using a cell phone with his hands is also quite difficult, and he uses Voiceitt for school. Historically he had an aide that would be his scribe and write what he wanted to say, but he often got frustrated with his aide because he’s a really smart kid and the aide sometimes didn’t really understand what he was trying to say.

He uses Voiceitt to write his essays, to… He’s taking a course in data security, so he’s using it to write code. He also uses it to engage in socialization with his friends. He uses it to write text messages because on the phone we have this easy way to share text into other apps.

Nice. I can easily just share the text into my email or text messaging or other kinds of social apps and everything, too?

Exactly.

Nice.

I love how you just brought up the aide because I know for some folks they seem to think that’s an accommodation. While helpful for sure, it doesn’t really garner independence. Like you said, with a situation of just especially when somebody’s very smart and maybe what they’re trying to articulate and get through is a little on a different level than the aide or something they understand. That’s great, and opens up just so much independence and just a whole new world for individuals. That’s awesome.

Well Rachel, the other reason we had you on was to talk about The Babel Group. I guess just start off with what is it.

Yeah, so The Babel Group is a mission-based company to bridge the gap between innovation and the people they’re meant to serve.

We think of our company as standing on three legs. One is the product distribution or reselling. We don’t actually create products, but what we do is we essentially find the best, most innovative products in the therapeutic space and assistive technology space, curate them, and bring them to market. Working with us, purchasing through us, doesn’t mean you spend more you. You’ll pay the same price, but what you’ll get is the added service of working with speech language pathologists and therapists and people with clinical knowledge to be able to support you.

The second leg is our consultation services, which we provide to companies that are looking to produce these innovative products for the end users that we know best. We actually provide the clinical expertise to these companies as they develop their products to make sure that they are headed in the right direction.

The third is a community, and we actually have a weekly meetup on Fridays at noon, it’s completely free, where we bring on different speakers who have come from a clinical world and who are now doing something interesting with their clinical hat on. That may look like customer success at a tech company, or advising architects on how to create inclusive spaces. We have inventors. We have all different individuals who are doing very interesting things with their clinical hat on. We have that meetup.

All of that can be found on our website thebabelgroup.com. And it’s B-A-B-E-L, which is based on the story of the Tower of Babel.

Awesome, awesome.

Well, and I know that Voiceitt of course is a part of The Babel Group. Or if not, I feel like you really missed a good opportunity there, but I do know it’s part of it.

What are some of the other accommodations and things that are out there and part of The Babel Group?

Sure, well, Voiceitt is our first product that we brought out into The Babel Group, so yes, we do sell Voiceitt and support Voiceitt and Voiceitt customers.

Some other products are Glint by Ner Chat, which is a really cool, innovative product. The way I like to talk about it is it’s like your Mayor Johnson Pictures married ChatGPT and had a baby and has… Now we have the ability to create communication boards and visuals within literally seconds. You just put in your prompt, and it creates this beautiful topic-specific communication board or visual schedule or visual checklist. Very cool stuff.

Some other products are that we have is we have a microphone that actually works really well with Voiceitt. A lot of AT lending libraries are actually purchasing this. We had the Easterseals Massachusetts actually just purchased a couple. We like to call it a noise elimination microphone because it really does eliminate background noise into going into your microphone but also eliminates the noise or the speech that that individual is using and sending that speech into the environment. If for example, a student wanted to use this in the classroom, they can use speech-to-text without interrupting the class, and then the class won’t interrupt their speech recognition.

Nice. Well, I can see how that could work in an office setting or any place, especially if you’re trying to use voice input for things that are maybe private health information or other stuff that you don’t want everyone in the entire place hearing also.

Exactly. We have a lot of other products, and I don’t want to take up too much time because I really do want to focus on Voiceitt today. But everybody can really come and check out our website, our other products, and set up demos with us or reach out to us on our website.

What I wanted to also talk about with Voiceitt is that oftentimes when people think about it or ask about it, they often say, “Oh well, it’s too expensive. We can’t afford it.” One of the missions of The Babel Group has been to actually unlock funding for Voiceitt. That means really finding funding sources for our customers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay for it out of pocket.

We’ve been quite successful in 15 states now finding different sources of funding, and one of them is actually Easterseals in Massachusetts have been able to purchase Voiceitt for their customers. They’re purchasing five-year licenses for their clients.

Oh, very cool. Very cool.

You want to talk about some of the other kinds of ways for funding that people might be able to find, or other opportunities that might be out there?

Yes, I would love to talk about that.

Typically in the school setting, the schools will fund Voiceitt. Sometimes there are budgeting restrictions, where the schools don’t have the budget or they’re not allocating funding for this. What I would say to educators and those who are supporting individuals in the school system who have non-standard speech and who are good candidates for speech-to-text or in general or for Voiceitt specifically is to make sure that you write the accommodation of speech-to-text on their IEP, that it’s an educational requirement. Once it’s an educational requirement and an accommodation, then the school is actually forced to find the funding for it.

The goal here is to get students the accommodations they need. That’s one of the tricks that I suggest to therapists is to make sure that it’s in their IEP, that the accommodation is listed there. That’s one funding source is through schools.

And then once the students are aging out or in that transitional phase, there are lots of programs that provide purchasing… They’re able to purchase Voiceitt through vocational rehab services. Many states, and this is also something for individuals to look into, have this service of vocational rehab. They actually purchase assistive technology for individuals who need it to be able to obtain gainful employment. That’s definitely something to look into if you’re unsure whether your state or there is funding available, either for you or for a client that you serve.

And then the third, well, third and then we’ll talk about a fourth kind of option, but the third option is actually Medicaid waivers. Depending on the state you live in, you can actually utilize if you have Medicaid waiver funding available to you those funds to purchase Voiceitt. The way to find out whether you even have funds available is to reach out to your service coordinator. The service coordinator basically has access to that information and would be able to tell you, A, whether you have Medicaid waiver funding available to you, and, B, how you’re able to use or allocate those funds. Many times the funding available is perfectly suitable for purchasing assistive technology.

And then the fourth kind of option is to look into your state’s either Relay services or departments of developmental disabilities and see whether they have any grants available for the purchase of assistive technology.

I’ll give you a great example of a model state. Rhode Island, for example, has a program where they purchase assistive technology for anyone who falls within a given income bracket and gets a simple letter from a professional stating they require this assistive technology to communicate. They’ve been able to fund this through their Relay services. Typically, historically Relay services were actually funding telephone lines and actual physical telephones. But since that has become obsolete, one of the advocates, her name is Denise Corson, she’s just amazing, she lobbied government to add one word into that law and into that budgeting. That word is called wireless. Once she added the word wireless, it opened up the funding opportunities to purchase lots of different assistive technologies and sometimes cell phones, cell phone lines, and Voiceitt in other wireless subscription-based applications.

Very cool. I did not know all those different kinds of ways and avenues of being able to pay for the things that are out there. I knew about a few, but that’s awesome. You’ve really done a lot of legwork to find all those different things, so that is really, really great to be able to help folks. That always seems to be sometimes the hardest part that there’s those great tools out there and people just aren’t able to access, so that is super cool.

I did have a few just questions about Voiceitt. Are you able as a user to create a personal vocabulary or even shortcut phrases for longer things?

Yes, I’m glad you asked that question.

Yes, we still have that ability to add personal phrases like proper nouns, names, and places that are relevant to you, as well as shortcut phrases. Shortcut phrases have been really useful for people who have maybe shortness of breath and cannot say more than maybe two to three words at a time. They’re able to literally program something like… Favorite song, let’s say that’s the prompt. They say favorite song, and then Voiceitt can output Alexa play “You Are My Sunshine” on my TV or something like that. And so it can actually be used to control your smart home.

But also to order a cup of coffee when you go to Starbucks. You can say small coffee, and then it can output, “I’d like a small latte with one sugar and cream,” something like that.

Oh sorry, go ahead.

Sorry.

I wanted to highlight another feature that we have, which is called Voice Controls. Voice Controls, it’s utilized mainly in our dictation mode, which is speech-to-text. What it allows the Voiceitt user to do is to essentially dictate the punctuation and formatting. They can say something like comma, question mark, new line, new paragraph, and even tell Voiceitt to stop listening. It’ll actually stop.

There’s just a lot more accessibility features that don’t require physical engagement.

Oh, yeah. It opens up a whole new world in many, many different ways.

Voiceitt and The Babel Group work together to apply for a grant to expand the use case of Voiceitt. Because currently Voiceitt works well for people who are understood by their familiar listeners, so that typically means mild to moderate dysarthria. As long as someone’s understood by familiar listeners, Voiceitt can actually be trained to understand those individuals.

The grant that we worked on together is actually an expansion of the existing technology to actually include individuals with severe dysarthria. Those individuals are sometimes not even understood by their familiar listeners. We actually won the grant. It’s an A2 Collective NIA, so National Institute of Aging Grant. We’re actually working on this as we speak to develop a expansion to our existing Voiceitt offering that will understand individuals with non-standard speech who also have severe speech impairment.

And then I guess just to close it out, tell us a little bit about your ambassadors.

Yes, so we have individuals who are Voiceitt customers that have taken it upon themselves to tell their stories to basically tell others about their experiences using Voiceitt. How they use Voiceitt, and allow others to have a window into the real lives of people who are using Voiceitt in their day-to-day lives and how it’s impacted their communication goals and achieving their communication goals.

Awesome.

I guess we’ll start with Voiceitt. If they want to find out more about Voiceitt, what’s a good way for them to be able to do that?

They could go to the Voiceitt website www.voiceitt.com, and and they can also reach support@voiceitt.com.

If they want to reach me specifically, they can reach me at rachel@thebabelgroup.com, and that’s the, B-A-B-E-L, group.com.

Also, visit us at thebabelgroup.com to start your free Voiceitt trial. We do have a 30-day free trial for anyone with non-standard speech who would like to use it. We also have an extended free trial for individuals who are supporting those who want to use Voiceitt as a demo license that they can use to show what Voiceitt can do with their own voice. If they’re trying to introduce others to Voiceitt, they can actually have their own license.

Awesome, awesome.

Rachel, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about all the amazing updates to Voiceitt. As we were saying, it’s been so long I didn’t even realize it was still in beta back the last time we talked. But so exciting to see the changes, the ease of use, the integration. And then not only that, but also finding creative and amazing ways to get it in the hands of individuals that can use it.

And then also for telling us about The Babel Group and everything that it’s doing to really be able to get bridge that gap between the amazing tools that are out there to help people and the people that they can actually assist.

Thank you so much for coming on and just telling us about all these great things.

Thanks, Josh, for having me today.

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. 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, or 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.