My Top 6 AI Tools for Speech Language Therapy

Here's my growing list of favorite AI tools that help me as a Speech-Language Pathologist

*free downloads below*

It feels like we're living in a weird time right now for many reasons. AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is one of them for me. There's an undeniable boom happening in terms of tech innovation. But we are also contending with looming, overwhelming ideas about AGI - Artificial General Intelligence (a level of AI that can match human-level thinking) - and what that may mean for life as we know it when it inevitably (or so the experts say) arrives on the scene.

From a less heady, day-to-day-for-real-SLPs perspective, I am starting to wrap my head around things; however, this will be an ongoing endeavor. There are new AI tools cropping up every day, and I think it's a good idea for us to keep up with what's available out there. While I think it would be a long time before AI could ever replace what we do in speech-language therapy (although I'll bet there are a few tech CEOs out there who don't appreciate this fact), I think we should take advantage of some of the assistance AI can provide.

So here's my (growing) list of AI tools I've been finding helpful for speech language therapy:

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a chatbot to which you can ask complex questions using natural, conversational language. It is a large language model (LLM), which means that it generates its responses based on vast amounts of data it has taken (stolen?) from the internet, including books, websites (possibly this one!), articles, etc.

I have found ChatGPT to be helpful for a variety of things, including generating stories about my students' interests/with their target articulation sounds or words, brainstorming activity ideas, brainstorming goals, etc.

Some important things to know when using ChatGPT:

• ChatGPT "hallucinates," meaning that it presents things as factual that are actually outright wrong. Look critically at everything it gives you, and don't use it to replace clinical judgment, or for important research or clinical writing.

• Don't feel like you have to be polite when you're chatting with it. Using words like please, thank you, can you, etc., needlessly wastes energy.

• The more specific you are with your prompts, the better the output will be. There's a lot of information out there about "prompt engineering" and people sharing complex prompts for ChatGPT. These days, one of my prompts might look like: "You are a veteran SLP with a passion for working with students with developmental language disorder and dyslexia. Give me 10 great receptive language activity ideas for a third grader who likes dragons and cooking. They should be multimodal and target vocabulary and critical thinking skills with a focus on comprehension."

• If you don't like what it gives you, you can always tweak the prompt and tell it to do it again.

I'm also looking into Perplexity as a possible competitor to ChatGPT. It seems to have a lot of cool functions, and I like that you can limit its search to information from research. It also cites its sources as it does this (Whether the citations are real or fabricated is TBD...). I shall continue to noodle with it.

Diffit

Diffit is a differentiation tool where you can input really anything - a preferred topic, an article/pdf, a transcript from a video, a web page, a list of key vocabulary - and it will quickly generate a reading passage according to the grade level you specify. It can also generate a ton of activities based on graphic organizers.

Some of my favorite Diffit activities have been chapter summaries based on books my students are reading in their ELA classes (this feature may now be behind a paywall), reading comprehension activities where students choose emojis and hashtags based on what they have read (this builds their annotation skills), and reading passages that contain target vocabulary I have chosen, either from their curriculum or a book we're reading.

All activities created in Diffit can be exported quickly and easily to Google Docs and Google Slides, which makes it a great tool for virtual sessions too.

As with ChatGPT, watch the output it gives you closely for any inaccuracies.

Lexsee

I've been on a years-long quest to find the best text-to-speech tech for my dyslexic students. (I guarantee you have dyslexic students on your caseload right now - read this post for more information). Text-to-speech, as the name suggests, is technology that will read written text aloud. The voices that AI generates are becoming increasingly human-sounding, but they still do weird things. Believe it or not, it's been really hard to find an application that will do all of the following:

• allow ePub versions of books to be uploaded

• highlight the text as it is read (especially each word at a time)

• read in a normal, human voice without weird glitches

• allow for annotations as the book is read

• look up unknown words

• free

Different applications have different pros and cons. ElevenLabs is free and has great, human-like speech, and it highlights the text as it goes, but it doesn't handle big ePub files well, and the free version won't get you very far. Outloud allows for annotation, but it's not free. NaturalReader also has a lot of great features, but the free version has a very robotic voice.

So far, the best free text-to-speech tech I've found is Lexsee. Lexsee's developers are dyslexic! It is an "AI-powered tutoring platform" that has some cool features and is currently free in its beta mode, although they say it will always be free for teachers. It's a bit of a process to convert digital books into the ePub format it accepts, but once you figure this out, you can upload any books your students are reading, and Lexsee will read them in a natural-sounding voice while the text is highlighted. Annotation is currently not possible (at the moment, I get my students to annotate in their hard copies). The AI voice also makes weird mistakes occasionally, and it has more trouble with dialogue between characters. Lexsee has a very cool feature where students can talk to an AI tutor about the book they're reading (it doesn't give away answers or summaries and will tactfully redirect off-topic questions/comments). It also allows students to look up unfamiliar words and to even work on pronouncing them.

NotebookLM

This is a recent find, and it feels like a game-changer. It's described as an AI thinking tool and research partner. NotebookLM allows you to upload PDFs, websites, and other sources of info into notebooks. You can then chat with its chatbot function (like you would with ChatGPT), but NotebookLM will generate its responses only from the information you have provided.

I don't know about you, but since I've graduated, I've largely felt like the onus has been entirely on me to stay current with research. While continuing ed courses are great, I also have to manage the constant stream of research articles that are being published in our field. I usually get the emails from the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology at 6 AM on a Wednesday. I'm usually proud of myself if I take the time to look at the titles of the articles, and every now and then I'll print some out or read them online. After that, I'm left hoping I'll remember the info I've just read, or I'll save the PDFs or articles that I think are really important in a folder on my hard drive.

I think NotebookLM is about to transform this into a much easier process. I can upload any articles I like on various topics, keep these collections as notebooks, and then ask it anything I want about the information in the notebook. My mind was blown even further when it generated a jaunty, real-sounding 25-minute podcast with two speakers discussing the content of my articles.

For example, I had a collection of good articles about vocabulary instruction across grade levels. I uploaded them to a notebook. I then asked the notebook to give me a vocabulary development goal for a second grader with DLD, and it gave me a decent one:

"By [End Date of IEP Period, e.g., June 2025], [Student's Name], a 4th grader with DLD, will demonstrate increased depth of semantic knowledge for high-impact Tier 2 vocabulary words from classroom texts and read-aloud books1.... This will be measured by achieving a score of 7 or above on a 9-point semantic knowledge measure (definition and context questions) for 80% of 15 targeted words per grading period, including identification from novel picture arrays or spontaneous use in classroom activities."

I intend to continue uploading new and interesting journal articles to various notebooks I create - basically, the articles I don't have time to read when they come out but wish I did! The free version of NotebookLM allows for up to 100 notebooks with up to 50 sources per notebook.

While hallucinations are still an issue to be on the lookout for, I think this minimizes their likelihood to some extent because we are controlling the information we give this tool. I've also read that there are issues with it reading things like tables in PDFs (which our journal articles tend to have a lot of); I'm interested in learning how to troubleshoot this as I go.

There may also be a way to share notebooks with others.

Game-changer, right? You're welcome!

MacWhisper

MacWhisper is an app (for Macs, obvs) that will quickly transcribe audio files into pretty accurate text. This makes language sample analysis much faster. Here's a post about how I finally figured out a workable way to do language sample analysis.

I've heard from other SLPs who just use the speech-to-text function in Google Docs for this.

We should keep our students' privacy in mind as we use these transcription tools, which includes being careful about sensitive personal data or any identifying information, and being mindful of file names, etc.; however, I have yet to have any issues with this.

If you happen to work in a setting where HIPAA needs are more of an issue, rev.ai has a paid, HIPAA-compliant plan.

The Writing Pathway

The Writing Pathway "is a free, research-based and researched scope & sequence for teaching writing, with AI tools that create practice for students in any subject or curriculum, grades 3-12." It seems to be aligned with the well-regarded Hochman Method, from what I know of it. I wrote a post about how I use this tool here. It's pretty great!

Please feel free to add your go-to AI tools in the comments!

And if you need any research-based therapy materials...

LEVEL UP YOUR SPEECH THERAPY ACTIVITIES WITH STORYWHYS

Did you find this blog post helpful? Subscribe below to get the latest blog posts, which feature lots of speech therapy ideas for busy SLPs who want to provide fun, impactful, and meaningful speech-language therapy.

StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy, and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.

Did you know book companions can be among the best speech therapy materials for elementary students? Explore all of the StoryWhys book companions for speech therapy in my store. You'll find comprehensive book companions that target many different language skills or Spotlight Series book companions that focus on one type of skill, all using high-quality, beloved storybooks.

For quick videos to help you get the most from StoryWhys book companions, check out the YouTube channel here.

And get a FREE, 71-page book companion for speech therapy on the free downloads page.

Enjoy!