New Delhi: When Christie takes her son Patrick out in public, she braces herself. “When people hear Patrick, they stare and point because he sounds different; he cannot speak like them. I feel embarrassed taking him out too much because I don’t want them to stare at us and talk about us,” she says. “So we leave quickly.”
For parents of non-verbal children, silence can be both a barrier and a heartbreak. And above all, it can mean watching your child long to connect with a world that doesn’t quite know how to meet them halfway. But this year, for the first time, Christie heard her son speak—in a voice that was unmistakably his. His tone was brought together using the textures of his own vocalisations and shaped with the accent of his family, making it feel deeply his own.
The breakthrough came from a partnership between global tech company Monks and the Centre for Community Initiative (CCI) in Manipur.
‘My First Voice’ interface is a child-friendly solution, designed with real time text-to-speech and expandable preset inputs which seeks to help non-verbal conditions arising out of cerebral palsy, hearing impaired mutism and other development disorders, representing millions of impacted children throughout India.
For two years, Monks’ developers worked alongside communities, collecting the unstructured sounds—hums, vowels and sighs, that children like Patrick use every day, and training AI to turn them into fully formed speech. They worked tirelessly on shortening the time taken to record, synthesise and create a personalised AI voice from three days to less than five minutes. The pilot lit up ten lives. A mother heard her son say, “I love you too.” A father listened to his daughter recite poems she’d been writing for five silent years.
“The day he got the app, he was overjoyed and couldn’t wait to show us how it worked,” says Nemzaneng, mother of 13-year-old Tyson. What makes it all the more tender is how personal it is. The technology wasn’t just smart, it was kind.
“Standard AI models couldn’t capture these nuances, so we had to rethink conventional training methods,” says John Paite, chief creative officer at Monks India.
The team refined and reinvented the process, using family voice samples to anchor the child’s speech in familiarity.
Pauzagin Tonsing, founder of CCI, explains, “There are many children with disabilities, even in a remote town like ours, but the biggest challenge is diagnosis and acceptance by parents because of so much stigma around them. It was never about just saying words. It was about belonging.”
As the project grows, reaching more homes, more families, and more hearts, it carries with it a promise: no child should remain unheard.