Our story

While their technology was transforming research, they noticed a troubling gap in the clinic.

In 2016, Yvan and Greg were collaborating with clinicians who faced a persistent hurdle: The vast majority of speech testing currently relies on the same traditional, pen-and-paper form filling approaches to speech testing and scoring that were invented decades ago, in the absence of any technology.

They also noted the increasing challenges of clinicians working with speakers of minority and/or Indigenous languages. The few traditional tests available on the market were also not designed for speech testing in multilingual settings. Clinicians were left to their own devices, often in the context of more linguistically diverse caseloads.

Yvan and Greg, in close connection with several researchers in language acquisition and speech disorders, began working on a solution for this problem. Their first objective was to bring the best methodologies inspired by their research work but packaged in ways that are most useful to speech clinicians, researchers and students.

With SpeechCatcher, they bring together technologies that support all current methods of clinical speech testing but in ways that revolutionize the workflow and optimize its results. By moving from traditional methods to a high-performance tablet app, they ensured that:

• Clinicians generate and interpret clinical and linguistic analysis reports from reviewed transcriptions.
• Researchers can manage speech data in multilingual and multidialectal settings.
• Students can learn using the best testing methods available.

Today, SpeechCatcher serves as a bridge between resources, methods, and people. It offers tighter connections between scholarly research and training and professional speech clinicians. It removes the technological barriers that once sidelined minority, Indigenous, and multilingual speaker populations. Whether in a large urban centre or a more remote community, our mission remains the same: to provide every person with the same level of world-class technological support, worldwide.