Can AI transform speech therapy? Welcome to Worlds of Hello

What if your child with a speech delay could receive regular, consistent, and even fun speech support in your own home—guided by the sound of your own voice? For young children with speech delays and the caregivers who support them, Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume is working to make this vision a reality. 

Dr. Quarkume (“Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Ph.D.”)

Dr. Quarkume, an accomplished scholar, data scientist, associate professor at Howard University, and director of the CORE Futures Lab, is—among a myriad of other projects—using AI in innovative ways to make speech therapy more accessible to children and their families. Her new AI-based program is called Worlds of Hello.

“Worlds of Hello is an AI-powered platform that connects families with therapy, allowing them to support their child and find their voice,” Dr. Quarkume explained. “We focus on children with speech delays.” It started as a passion project inspired by her nephew, who has a speech delay, and the challenges her family faced in getting the support he needed—particularly with a shortage of speech therapists. “We all try to help him, but there’s a three-month wait on therapists, and there’s only a thirty-minute session generally a week, and we wanted more.”

(Worlds of Hello)

Seeing this issue unfold in her own family, Dr. Quarkume and a few of her like-minded students came together to build Worlds of Hello. “It is our way to allow families to create personalized lessons for their children to find their voice. So you’ll hear your mom’s voice or your dad’s voice, or you’ll see your mom’s face, your dad’s face, or a family member’s face.” 

The idea was simple enough: “When we first started, we felt it was like sending an audio file to your child on a phone, they hear your voice, and they start talking,” she explained, with the primary motive to speak being the comfort of hearing a familiar voice. “What we have right now is more dynamic, more engaging. There’s storytelling, there’s gamification, there is, again, AI in there that helps parents clone their voice.” 

The app includes various lessons and activities that prompt children to practice speaking. It strives to create the perfect balance between promoting speech development and gamification, with animations that make it enticing for young children. It also allows families to be actively involved in their child’s learning, and for clinicians to monitor both caregiver and child usage. Dr. Quarkume’s team now includes speech therapists who work to emulate practices used in live sessions in the digital program.

(Worlds of Hello)

Worlds of Hello also builds this sense of familiarity by accounting for linguistic diversity, particularly different accents and dialects. Its users can select from various dialects used in different parts of the country, allowing children to learn a language as they hear it around them. “So if your mom has an accent, and she wants to use her voice, there you go. If your dad has an accent, they use their voice, there you go,” Dr. Quarkume said. The goal is to expand and include other languages as well.

The program is currently undergoing beta testing, a process to prepare it for future broad consumption. The team is currently offering paid testing opportunities for families with young children with speech delays and speech therapists to test both sides of the program. But the road to this point hasn’t been easy; funding has been a constant hurdle. The project has received a Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), but is still facing funding difficulties. At this moment, the team continues to search for solutions to further their research and development. Dr. Quarkume explained how difficult it is for Black women in particular to fund their businesses—less than 1% of companies founded by Black women receive venture capital or similar financial support. She also noted the challenges of data privacy, especially for children, the costs associated with software and AI development, and the environmental impact of AI. However, she is hopeful about the project’s next steps: exploring avenues to complete the research and development, resolving any remaining bugs or issues, and bringing Worlds of Hello to market.

For Dr. Quarkume, it’s exciting to see the potential gains for families and the way it can support them. “It works—that children will see their family members in their learning environment and be drawn to speak and overcome their challenges, and that parents will feel comfortable contributing to their child’s learning journey, because it does take time and most parents are busy, right?” The possibility of expanding similar technology beyond pediatrics is also an exciting prospect, and she has received inquiries about doing so in areas such as geriatrics. “Voice technology has been here for a while,” she said, but described how her team wants to find its unlocked potential. “It’s just, where hasn’t it gone that we can kind of support?”

“If one child can speak or doesn't have trouble with speaking, it just makes the world better because that child can be productive and give back to their community as a citizen,” Dr. Quarkume shared. “So even though the work isn't considered top priority, some of us are still doing it because we know that the impacts supersede the communities that we’re working with,” referring to young children with speech delays. “It will benefit everyone if we still continue [to work] on these challenges.”