After losing her voice to Lou Gehrig’s disease, she is expressing herself again with this app

My name is Anne-Marie. I use Vocality app to talk every day. Since losing her voice to Lou Gehrig's disease, Anne-Marie Poirier has relied on technology to express herself. When you have to write your conversation, it's hard to keep yourself in the conversation. She says Vocality has made that process easier. Two engineering students developed the app in partnership with Polytechnique's tech incubator, Propolis. Like many similar apps, it allows users to type in a message, which it then reads out loud in a cloned version of their voice. Maybe we could talk about it next week. But it also uses AI to predict what the person wants to say. Offer personalized shortcuts and correct errors quickly. Users can also tweak how a word is pronounced. There's two members of my family who lost the ability to speak due to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Seeing them struggle to such an extent that they would give up their tool and they would use pen and paper instead to write. That sparked the idea that tech could do more. Previously, other apps will use something that is running on the cloud, on a server, and so that can have, you have connection issues. If you don't have good Wi-Fi, that can slow you down. So losing your ability to speak just because you have a bad connection, whereas running on the device, it's always there. And since January 2026, I have to use an application to communicate. Vocality is already available on the App Store for iPhones and iPads, with the creators expecting to release an upcoming version for Android. This McGill professor, who specializes in motor speech disorders, consulted on the app's development. She's hopeful that this kind of technology will continue to improve so those who lose the ability to speak can still participate in society. It is one thing to communicate one-on-one. When we're in a group setting... For timely jokes and being part of a lively conversation, we want to have even greater prediction, greater speed. But in the meantime, Poirier says vocality allows her to be herself. You are still alive, intelligent, full of energy. Showing that while she cannot speak, she still has a voice.