Aphasia Coach: A Personal Project for Speech Recovery

This one is more personal than most of my projects. A family member was recovering from surgery and dealing with mild aphasia — a condition that affects the ability to speak, understand, read, or write. Their speech therapist recommended daily practice, but the existing apps weren't working. They were too generic, using unfamiliar words and phrases that caused more frustration than progress, and not personalized enough to feel relevant.

So I built Aphasia Coach.

What It Does

Aphasia Coach uses AI to personalize practice sessions to the individual — their vocabulary, their recovery stage, their aphasia type. Instead of drilling words they've never heard, users practice with language that's actually familiar to them.

• Personalized exercises — adapted to the user's vocabulary and recovery stage
• Spaced repetition — evidence-based scheduling to reinforce words at the right intervals
• Voice-first — TTS and STT keep practice verbal rather than text or click-based, which is closer to real communication
• Free to start — no paywalls to get going

Why Voice-First Matters

Most language apps are built around reading and typing. For someone with aphasia, that's the wrong modality — the goal is verbal communication, not spelling. By centering practice on speech (speaking and listening), the exercises are more representative of real-world use and less frustrating for people who find visual/text tasks harder post-injury.

Open Source & What's Next

The code is open source — I wanted to make it easy for others to build on, whether that's adding new exercise types, support for other languages, or new modalities. The next obvious direction is image generation for visual association practice, which could make exercises more effective for certain aphasia types.

If you or someone you know is dealing with aphasia, give it a try at aphasiacoach.com. Feedback is very welcome.