Catching up with news about AI in AAC Apps

It is very exciting to see how Artifical Intelligence (AI) can be used for the good! However, keeping up with the changes in AI usage for AAC users is hard!

Recently many AAC app developers have mentioned AI in their marketing. This has been mainly for word prediction / finishing and sentence creation. Examples of apps available include Cboard, Alek, Spoken, AI Communicator, SmartPredict. Both Predictable and Proloquo4Text use machine learning within the context of the AAC users' writing behaviour, rather than using generative AI based on large language models as seen in chatbots.

Interestingly, there appear to be fewer apps where AI image or board creation is being offered. Here are the ones we found:

• Easy AAC featuring an AI icon generator for creating custom symbols (website available but not found on Apple or Google Play store).
• SymboTalk has an AI assistant for generating full communication boards, integrated with ChatGPT (iOS).
• Click AAC uses AI to automatically generate symbol-supported communication boards from uploaded or taken photos (iOS)
• QuickPic AAC is an AI-powered app that generates topic-specific symbol displays from photographs.(Android)
• Cboard has Cbuilder as an AI board generator with AI image generation coming onto the market this year.

Change is definitely something to watch out for as several AI image generation models have been updated. This has made us reconsider the use of Stable Diffusion as we build our next version of Symbol Creator AI. We are hoping that Flux.1-schnell will provide a speedier and simpler answer for users, with improved symbol accuracy rates from the prompts made in Symbol Creator AI in order to generate a symbol for a specific purpose and in a certain style. An example would be “a person baking bread”.

We have been working hard to create a new interface for the Symbol Creator AI app that will be integrated into Board Builder as well as still allowing for downloads and adaptations. Meanwhile, the trials with all the new AI generated symbol sets have been interesting and helped us to figure out how best to offer an app that does not require us all to become AI experts!