An Open Letter to Families with Communication Challenged Children

The first thing we noticed about my son was that he wouldn’t turn his head when we called his name. Next was the tiptoe walking. Then he passed the usual speech milestones and kept not talking. If you’re here considering this app for your own child, I don’t need to explain how that feels. Earlier this year, he was formally diagnosed with level three autism.

Like many families with non-verbal children, we tried everything we could. My son sees ABA, occupational, and speech therapists, and we tried the available speech devices for several months. He never really took to them.

Even while the progress was slow, I noticed something: he could focus intently on movies and books. He could watch a favorite movie for an hour and a half without looking away. That made me wonder: If I couldn’t bring his attention to a language device, could I bring a language device to his attention?

I built a tiny prototype using AI-generated pictures of our real life, drawn in an animation style he loved, and used AI to recreate my voice. We put it on an old touchscreen laptop.

The response was immediate.

He wouldn’t put it down. He was touching a storybook made from his own life, and suddenly he could use it to speak with his father’s voice. Within minutes, he produced the longest sentence we had ever heard from him.

I spent the next month building.

Three months later, his use of language has exploded. He can tell us what he wants to eat, what toy he wants to play with, or what movie he wants to watch. The app tracks his progress, helps us teach new language, and even has a listening mode that lets us communicate back and forth in ways we simply couldn’t before. I can speak to him, and my words appear on his board as images he can understand and use as vocabulary.

This website and application were originally built for my son. At the urging of his speech-language therapist and others who have seen him use it, I’m now preparing to offer the iOS app to other families.

I cannot promise it will work for your child the way it worked for mine. This is new. I don’t have a clinical study or a large dataset, only my son’s experience and encouraging signs from a small number of early users. For your child, it may be transformative, or it may amount to little more than some personalized pictures they enjoy. I cannot make any guarantee and more of you than I might wish will not find success using the device.

If you understand that and would still like to try it, please acknowledge that below and follow the steps. I’m personally working with this first group of families so I can help get each child set up and learn what works.

— Andrew
Founder, My World Tap to Talk LLC

How to become a Founding Family

Please read the letter above, then check both boxes. Your next step appears below them.