Interview with Smartbox Group CEO Dougal Hawes

Dougal Hawes, Group CEO of Smartbox Assistive Technology shares his inspiring journey from growing up in the English countryside to leading a company that empowers people with communication disabilities. Dougal's story is deeply intertwined with his father's dedication to empowering the disabled, a passion that began with a chance encounter in a hospital and evolved into a lifelong commitment. This familial influence not only shaped Dougal's understanding and empathy but also paved the way for his career in creating innovative communication devices for those with speech difficulties.

Explore the evolution of communication technology for disabilities, from the early days of personal computing to today's sophisticated augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Discover how companies like Smartbox have leveraged advancements in consumer technology to create comprehensive tools tailored to the unique needs of individuals with communication challenges. The conversation highlights the critical role of software and hardware integration, offering insights into the complexity and necessity of providing personalized communication solutions for people with diverse requirements, whether from birth or due to acquired disabilities.

Gain insight into the global landscape of AAC technology, as we discuss the significant need for these solutions and the efforts to expand accessibility worldwide. We examine the transformative impact of technologies such as eye-tracking for individuals with conditions like ALS, and how AI and voice cloning are poised to revolutionize the field further. The episode underscores the importance of combining technology with expertise and training, addressing distribution challenges, and the potential for AAC to be integrated as essential medical devices. Hear about the ripple effect of increased visibility in AAC, encouraging more people to recognize its benefits, and the role major tech firms play in advancing accessibility features.

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:00 - David Williams
Well, many people with disabilities have difficulty speaking and they need help to communicate and achieve independence. It seems like a really productive use case for technology and, in fact, today's guest is leading the charge. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of strategy consulting firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Dougal Hawes, group CEO of Smartbox Assistive Technology, which enables communication and independence for those who experience difficulty with speech. Do you like the show? If so, please subscribe and leave a review. Dougal, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Well, I mentioned when I reached out to introduce myself, I actually saw one of your devices in use. I thought it was super cool and really very, very useful and enabling for this individual who was using it. So I said I got to meet the guy who's behind it. So now we're doing that. 

And I want to hear all about the product and the company, but before that I want to hear about, kind of, how you got here and specifically you know what your childhood was like, any childhood influences that have stuck with you? 

0:01:18 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, absolutely so. Well, I grew up in the middle of England in the countryside and had a fairly uneventful but enjoyable childhood. But in terms of what happened that led me down this career path is very much deep rooted in my family history. So the story really starts and this is the story actually of Smartbox starts when my mum had just given birth to my sister, my older sister and my dad was there at the bedside and got speaking to the dad at the bed next to them in the ward in the hospital and this guy had just developed a new telephone system for deaf people. It's back in the 70s, so a new bit of technology, and my dad got really interested in this, got talking to the guy and, uh, and actually the guy wanted a case for it. My dad, as a hobbyist, did a bit of leather work so we ended up, um, making a case for this, uh, this telephone, which, by the way, was kind of an early version of text messaging so a way that deaf people could use a phone, um, anyway. 

So he got involved in that venture, which unfortunately didn't work out and then failed. But but following that, through the connections made um, he began work for a charity, which he spent all my childhood working for a charity, um, and so that had a big influence on my life, because that's what I always knew my dad is how he was defined as a child uh, as somebody that worked supporting disabled people. So I'll just tell you a little bit more about the charity because it's kind of interesting. They were called the foundation for the communication for the disabled, so not the most catchy name. No, incredible, incredible impact. So what they were doing was going around the UK and his job was to meet disabled people, understand their needs and then create technology Often this was sort of mechanical solutions as well as electronic solutions to help them do the things that other people were able to do and take for granted. So communication was one of them. Um. But if you imagine somebody born without hands or arms, how are they going to type? So they might have speech, but how are they going to type? So he did a lot of work and, you know, in his workshop developing bespoke um solutions. So that that was my childhood. 

We moved from Brighton, on the south coast of England, to a town called Great Malvern, which is where I said I grew up, right in the middle of England, and that was so he could travel to all corners of the country as needed, but we also had the offices of the charity based in our house. So so one of the yeah, defining memories of my, of my childhood was people different disabled people coming into our house and you know, I'd come back from school and they'd be sat around our kitchen table and I'd meet them and I just learned a huge amount about the challenges faced and also how to interact and to learn from disabled people and understand their different challenges. So, yeah, it was kind of very influential in terms of what I chose to do with my career and my life. 

0:04:30 - David Williams
You know I always ask this question because, first of all, I'm interested in it. But also usually with these sort of discussions you jump right into the business now and there's an interesting backstory, often going back decades, is often the case. A lot of people I interview are parents who are physicians, and so they see some insight about healthcare. Your story is interesting. It makes me think. You know, maybe I should have been more on top of it when my wife was giving birth. 

The only thing I can remember is my first child was 1998, and I had my Blackberry at the time and I had the Economist magazine and I did write a letter to the editor that was published. It was like three, it was three sentences and they published it. So it hasn't had the same lasting impact, I think. So I see that you did some work in journalism, film and broadcasting. I think that was your education before you. You were working with some charities after uh, after school as well. So after you got out of that, out of the house and into school and onto your career, how did that, how did that uh transpire? 

0:05:33 - Dougal Hawes
well. So when I was growing up, the the company that later became smartbox didn't exist, um, and I was always encouraged to just study and spend my time doing things that I enjoyed. That was kind of the steer for my parents. There was no big academic push in terms of going down sort of traditional routes, but I did really enjoy school and I really enjoyed university, and so I just chose a course that I thought looked interesting and it was genuinely fascinating, um, but didn't really hold much relevance to what I ended up doing. Yeah, um, the, the. 

So what actually happened was I finished university, um, and initially I joined the family business. 

Now, at that time this is in 2004 um, it was my, my mum and my dad had started the business, uh, they started the year I left home, so it'd been going for three years whilst I studied university, and then my brother joined um and he had sort of self-taught him how to do a bit of coding, so he was brought in to take the, uh, the software products on, and then I joined, really as a summer job initially, um, but you know, obviously an interest and I did wonder where it might go, yeah, and so I got into it and I'll tell you a bit more about my early experiences. 

But but the charity side, what? What I did was I? I did about two and a half years for the family business and, like I said, it was initially just four of us. It was very much like exclusively a family business, yeah and um, and I did that for about two and a half years. Uh, the company grew very steadily. We, we by the time I left, I think there's about 10 of us, yeah, and three of them are people we went to school with me and my brother. So we just like it was like the local- community and we, you know it was great fun, but I needed to go off and do my own thing. 

So I spent some time, uh, doing some voluntary work in South America, that sort of thing, and then I wanted to just, I guess, do something away from the family bubble. Yeah, but always like, very clear, I needed to do something, purpose, so it had to have an outcome that benefited people, hence working in the charity sector. 

0:07:46 - David Williams
Great yeah. So then, as Smartbox got going, I've got the clear kind of background for that. But how did it actually come about as a company, and was there like a specific unmet need that you identified, or did you have a technology that you applied a solution to, or how did it really get going? 

0:08:08 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, so initially the story I described earlier, around going out and visiting and meeting different disabled people and understanding their needs, one of the common challenges people faced was communication. Uh, challenges people faced was communication and it's one of the, if not the most difficult of uh physical challenges that somebody, or cognitive challenges somebody, can face. You know it's such a complex thing. So we all take for granted um and something and we, I'm sure we'll get on to this. That is very um. You know. It presents in many different ways the challenges. Challenges are very varied because it's tied into that, it's language and everything else. So it's an absolutely fascinating area to be involved in. Anyway, what sort of happened was? As we kind of came out of the 90s, if you remember that period of time, suddenly computers were becoming commonplace in people's homes and I remember, remember we, you know, growing up, we always had a computer like a bbc micro yeah, had those in the states, but yeah, no, we didn't have that stuff. 

But I know, like what they had in the uk, like sinclair and you know that kind of stuff, yeah, yeah, just like there was no windows environment, just that I'm dancing, just like typing prompts, and I remember having like an early text-to-speech program and we had great fun as kids like making it, say rude words and things like that Right. 

Anyway, when computing evolved and we kind of got on to like the Windows 95 era and Windows XP later and that kind of was signaled computer scanning people's homes. So what existed more broadly was an industry around AAC and providing electronic solutions for people that couldn't speak. But they were built around dedicated solutions, so everything was sort of custom made, and what we saw early was an opportunity to build on the kind of consumer technology that was suddenly becoming commonplace, and so you were seeing more and more laptops and the first tablets were being released. There was a big deal back then when touchscreens became available, yes, um, and we used to have to buy touchscreen overlays, but you know that was amazing somebody that could reach out, touch a screen and select something on that screen to help them speak. So so that was the opportunity and it started very much as a software business and it was trying to really disrupt the AAC field by building on the consumer technology that was available. 

0:10:37 - David Williams
And now when you say AAC, that's the augmentative and alternative communication as a generally accepted term. And what does that comprise when you think about it? Uh, does it have a sort of a strict definition? 

0:10:49 - Dougal Hawes
um, I'm sure it does have a strict definition. I'm not going to recite it because I don't know, but what it what it really refers to is is alternative ways that people are able to communicate, and that can be things like sign language. Um, it can involve sort of what we would call low-tech resources, so things like spelling boards or, um, we have sort of communication boards that are symbolized. But in our as a business, like, our, focus is on what we call high-tech aac, so using um like computer technology and where you've got, like, the ability to present software that can present lots of language got it and so so software business, um, to get started and has it continued, because also the name is smart box, when box doesn't sound like software specifically. 

0:11:39 - David Williams
Um, but what has been the? The evolution? You have software and then you needed to be able to express it in hardware for people to be able to actually use it. Is that what's happened? 

0:11:47 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, so the software business. The idea was we quickly sort of did a lot of localizations and exported a lot of software as well, but we needed our resellers to build the hardware solutions. Yeah, and it's not enough just to have a tablet. You need amplification, you need a handle and a stand and various things like that. So Smartbox the original company was called Sensory Software and Smartbox was launched in 2006. And you're right, the box bit referred to the fact. At that point we were very clear that we also needed to build the hardware solution as well, and now that's a huge part of what we do is the full solution. It's not just the software business by any means. 

0:12:30 - David Williams
Help me understand the users Now. Clearly you were talking about as you were growing up. You're meeting people with disabilities and certainly many, many different types of disabilities and degree of disability as well, even if it's a similar category, segmenting the users or how much do they differ, you know, can you think of like a specific user, like archetype, or how do you think about that? 

0:13:01 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, and I think this is a brilliant question because it's one of our biggest challenges. So, just to provide a bit of context, if you think of challenges people might have with their vision, or challenges they might have with their hearing, or challenges they might have with their hearing or mobility, you the diagnosis of those conditions and the way they present, and then the solutions can be quite sort of scientifically mapped out and there's a lot of consistency there. I'm not saying it's always the same, there's a perfect solution every time, but it's enabled solutions for those challenges to be really scaled up and provided, you know, to a lot of people globally now. The challenges people face in terms of communication are still very common, but it's also a real challenge to find the right solution that will match their specific requirements. So internally we have a bit of a mantra which is one size fits one, yeah, and what we're referring to is that every single person that we provide um, we talk about providing voices for people. So either one of our hardware products or a couple of our software, the one thing we know is that their you, their needs and the way they want to use the software and the product will be unique from everyone else. So so just to give a bit more specifics on this. 

So we're working with people born with disabilities, we're working with people with acquired disabilities. So if you take someone born with a disability, they're not born literate or with language skills, so you've got to kind of combine all of that into the solution. They may have physical challenges. They may the solution. They may have physical challenges, they may not. They may have um other cognitive challenges. They may have a multiple condition. So there's there's many different things that have to be considered um and similarly, then somebody with an acquired disability. You know what is the condition and how does it present. So it might be the. So if sort of als is a common condition we support people with and yeah, for a lot of people with als. 

Cognitively they're not, uh, impacted, or the impact is minimal, and so you know it. What they're really trying to do is maintain their rates of communication, um, continue doing the things they always did, but you know, incredible, incredibly challenging physical difficulties. So often that will become a real focus in terms of the solution, on the access, in terms of how we operate the device. 

0:15:28 - David Williams
So this is a pretty. I can see this is a pretty complicated topic, so I like the idea of comparing it with vision. There was an exhibit, I think, at the Museum of Science in Boston, where I live, where people could put some sort of a simulator. They could understand what it's like to have Parkinson's or something like that, and so it helps you with the empathy and understanding what it's all about. You can imagine that what you're describing here with somebody who's got an acquired disability. You understand where they were before, and so there's a gap between that that you're trying to close to whatever extent. If somebody has an inborn disability, it's harder to understand the baseline and especially when you're trying to communicate about communication, it's inherently difficult to have the communication if somebody in fact needs help with communication, as opposed to if they've got a physical limitation. Uh, you can measure that a little more directly and even discuss it with them. So I can imagine that's a pretty complicated topic and I like the sort of you know, one, one at a time approach yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

0:16:29 - Dougal Hawes
And I think, um, you know, if you consider somebody, somebody born without the ability to speak, and then you're trying to present them language mapped into software, yes, the complexity of language and then how you map it and make it possible to find those words, and how you present those words to people. There's no sort of magic solution that is perfect. You know, we are, as an industry, constantly iterating and involving our understanding of what's going to work best, and then a lot of it is training, you know, and a learning process. So how, where are those words, why are they in that place, and how do you work to learn the system? So it's not always straightforward as well. Once you've got a device, it's not like putting on a pair of glasses and oh, there you go, it's fixed. 

0:17:20 - David Williams
Yeah, just adjust how it fits behind the ear or something. It's a little more complicated. 

0:17:26 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, exactly. So a huge part of what we're focused on is not just delivery of the product to someone, but the real commitment to how can we help them succeed in this with this in the long term. Yeah, that's what we really feel like we've done well is if people go on to successfully use their products, got it and you know the nature of it. 

0:17:46 - David Williams
Of course you can capture all the interactions that are that are occurring. To what extent is the personalization? I mean, I imagine you get some sort of baseline and then there's some sort of a tuning. To what extent is that data driven and is that improved over time? In other words, the actual inputs that you get and the outputs from the device itself, as opposed to observation, interviewing caregivers and that kind of thing. 

0:18:07 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah. So I wouldn't say it's so much data driven. That's involved in the product design process. But the way products are sort of chosen and then customized, often well, that will always happen with a clinical input. So there's a clinical intervention in the US that'd be a speech pathologist who's working with the individual. Our role as a company is to kind of be part of that team around the individual and you know we obviously um have high levels of knowledge about our own products. Um, actually our team, we have about 550 in our wider team and of those I think the latest count was around 90 of them are clinicians. So we have a lot of clinicians in our team, um with a lot of real world experience of working with people that need AAC and learning how to sort of tune the system or customize it or set it up to to meet their needs. 

And um, you know I talked earlier about my, my early career. So those early days I spent all my time out in the field working with the people that need the equipment and it's one of those things that I feel it was. It was such a privilege to do that job. It was really challenging. You'd go to many different environments. You know the conditions have no way of selecting who they affect. 

You know it could be all walks of life and you could go from joyous occasions where you're helping a child you know say I love you to their parents for the first time, and seeing all this wonderful emotion around that to really heartbreaking, desperate situations where you know you've got a parent of a you know in a young family and they've been diagnosed with a terminal illness and you know you're just doing your little bit to try and make their situation a tiny bit more tolerable. Yeah, but you can imagine all of that drives me and the wider team. You know that's. It's so profound what we do and the impact is so big. So yeah, it's, and therefore the variety is also incredible. 

0:20:17 - David Williams
Yeah, I mean you've got an amazing variety of things right. So on the one hand is taking somebody that from an inborn standpoint was disabled and you're able to enable them to do certain things, and then in other cases you may be able to slow or soften the decline that may be occurring. So it's a whole different set of things. I have a friend who's a pediatric neuro-oncologist and most of his patients die, and so you think about how do you go and how do you do that, and I was asking him what is it like? And the way he does is most of the families end up thanking him at the end of it, like it's. So it actually you know it's a. It's not just somebody has to do that job. It's an amazing thing if you can, if you can actually do it, and I think it's what's good about what you have is also there's a variety. You're not just, it's not all, just in one area. 

0:21:07 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and then you know you mentioned earlier about communication and independence, the other thing to bear in mind, let's just imagine you have, and I'll use a story of someone I went to see that just always stood out to me. It was a really interesting experience. This was somebody diagnosed with ALS, south coast of England, very normal family home, two young kids. I went in and I met this guy. 

It was clearly his mental health was in a really poor state he he didn't have a form of communication other than he could speak very softly and his wife could understand him, um, but he had no way of accessing a tablet, a phone or computer or anything else, um, so he set him up with the technology and it gave him a way to form messages. So, if you imagine, on the screen you've got keyboards and prediction tools and message tools and there's lots of things that are going to enable you to communicate with people face to face, and that's like the baseline, the core of what we do. But on the independent side, I showed this guy how, using eye tracking. I showed this guy how, using eye tracking so he was looking at different targets on the screen and you can use that to select things within Windows, within a web browser, whatever else. And so I just showed him this and I left the house that day and, as I described before, I felt like I'd done what I could to try and make the situation a little bit better. 

Anyway, about a month later, I got an email from him, and it was a really emotional email. I mean, the fact he'd written an email in itself was a big deal, because he had no way of doing that previously and what he said was that through the technology, he'd been able to go online and buy his kids Christmas presents and no one else knew they were coming. Like he had ordered them on Amazon and no one knew they were coming. He was able to do the weekly shop so he felt he could contribute back into the you know, the family rhythm, um, and also the family banking, and these things to him were hugely important. So we can't undo the impact of the condition, but we can do our very best to help maintain a better quality of life for those individuals. 

0:23:18 - David Williams
I think that's a great story. It illustrates actually how the technology works and what the impact could be, which is a big overlay on the condition. I know with ALS in particular and you brought it up a couple of times is really that example of someone going from the full, you know, full functioning, quite down and often fast, but sometimes it could be arrested to a certain extent. There's a company you're probably familiar with patients like me and I had met the um, the founders, who were brothers of somebody who had ALS and, uh, one was sort of on the fundraising side, one was more in the technology side and so different approach but similar motivation in terms of making things work out. So you've described a very kind of personal way that you got to this. 

The company evolved in a certain way and so I'm wondering, if you look at others in the field like Dynavox is an example that I'd say oh, here's two companies that do it. They also the last parts of the words rhyme and everything. Do they come from a different direction? Or it's like, are there? Does everyone sort of come in as sort of you know similar, like Kurtz and Avis, or are they different? Is it a different approach of what you know versus others yeah it's interesting. 

0:24:29 - Dougal Hawes
So I think there's a lot of companies that formed where there's maybe the founder had a family experience, you know, a child born with a condition or something like that. 

But actually, in the case of Dynavox, or Tobii Dynavox, a full name they started as a Swedish business that created an eye gaze technology. I'm not sure if they were the the first ones to get this. They were very early in in eye tracking and um, and I remember we spoke to them first in in 2006, the year we formed smartbox and um, and they showed us this technology and we were blown away because the impact it was clearly going to have on the people we served was was to be huge. So they came from that background and, to be fair, you know they've done an incredible job of really pushing our industry forward. They've scaled very well. You know they are the largest company in our field and it started, yeah, with the technology first, whereas I think you know you've heard the story of, probably where Smartbox and maybe other AAC companies started more on the kind of the people side and the service. But you know they've grown that. So, yeah, hats off to them. 

0:25:42 - David Williams
Yeah, good Now. You talked about how you began with a software and then you realized that you know you're going to need to get into hardware in order for that to work. But now we're also talking about a fair amount of time that's passed and in some incredible changes, both on hardware and software, and I'm thinking in particular, how there used to be a lot of different devices out there that have now been superseded by, in many cases, an iPhone or potentially an iPad, and I'm wondering, if we look at the world in 2024, going into 2025, versus, know, almost 20 years ago, is it, is it different now, and are you seeing that is an evolution toward more of a standard device and you can focus more on the software, or how, how, how does this all fit for you? 

0:26:26 - Dougal Hawes
yeah, that's it. I guess it's a bit of everything in the mix. So, um, you know I described earlier that we we built the company on the idea that people could um put the software on any device, and we've always stayed true to that ethos. So the software has always been available. We have an app called grid for ipad that's available for anybody to download um and and run on their on their tablet. 

The reality is, you know, the the stats say that one in 200 people at some point in their life will face a significant communication challenge. Yeah, so, and and that you know a different stat says there's around 50 million people globally right now that would benefit from AAC and as an industry, we are barely scratching the surface. So when we're talking to our teams and we're talking about ambition and visions for the future, it's really how to massively scale our provision. I've also talked about the challenges with that and how often expertise and training and education has to go alongside that. But, yeah, we recently reduced the cost of our iPad app and just did a big 50% promotion and we see, then, more people buying the app and putting it on their iPads, and we believe that's great for us and great for us as a business as well. As you know what we're trying to do as a mission, we also take iPads and build one of our major product lines around the iPad. It's a fantastic platform for what we do, particularly those that are using the touchscreen and direct access. 

So I would say we embrace new technology. You know we are, relative to the big tech firms, we're a small niche market. Yeah, we need those guys to be developing, to be improving their accessibility features as well, which I think a lot of the big tech firms have really made major progress in recent years in terms of how they are thinking about, about disabled people when designing their products, which is all good for us. You know, I think, um, the other thing we see is the more aac that is provided, the more other people see it and think, oh, hang on, that could work for this person. I know right, and and it and it really helps spread that further. So, yeah, I mean it's the sort of scaling up of AOC provision is what we want to see, and we want to see it happen globally, and we're not there by any means. So we've got a lot of work to do, but that's our big ambition. 

0:28:58 - David Williams
OK, so let's let's talk about distribution a little bit, because that's always a big thing, right, there's people that need it. So where, if you just look today, where are the customers? Are they all in like western europe and the us or like where? How does it break down? 

0:29:11 - Dougal Hawes
roughly, yeah, well. Well, I would say, in terms of just thinking globally, where we can reach today, um, again, you know the fact that you can download software from anywhere in the world. Now, um, the app store is a, an amazing distribution marketplace. Yeah, so those things have enabled us to provide our, our products, to people in many countries. So I think each year we, we, we provide our software in about 100 countries a year. But where we're really active is right now. It's countries where there's there's the infrastructure to support people that need AAC um, and yes, it's generally, uh, you know, north America, europe, australasia, there, that's where most AAC is provided for um and the infrastructure it's. It's a combination of uh funding, uh expertise, it's professionals that understand um, what is required and how to train on it, etc. And then it's awareness is a huge barrier for us as people understanding the technology and thinking of it when they are faced with a challenge that would benefit from it. 

0:30:19 - David Williams
So it sounds like there's a direct-to-consumer approach, at least for the software. It sounds like it's available in the app store. Is that right? Someone can download it there. And then how about the physical products? Do they go through distributors or do people buy directly? Or how does it get into somebody's hands or onto their wheelchair? 

0:30:35 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, so we have a combination of direct sales and through a partner network that works globally. But even when we're working with those partners, in almost every case works globally. But even when we're working with those partners, in almost every case ultimately it's provided through um, the healthcare system that is local to that country so it's very much. 

You know it's. It's certified as a medical product and I think it's very important that is always seen as a medical product. It's you know, it's designed, uh and and provided to support medical conditions that mean that people are unable to speak or they're choosing not to speak, and so I think that's the right place for it, because sometimes, you know, we do have funding come through education or social care or other channels. Yeah, I think it's. It's so important you have the expertise around it. Otherwise, you get scenarios where equipment is provided and it ends up in a cupboard and it just frustrates people and you go backwards in that case, that is frustrating, right? 

0:31:33 - David Williams
Because it's a promise I'm going to have this thing smart box and then it's just a box, a dumb box, and I spent money on it, or you know. Yeah. 

0:31:40 - Dougal Hawes
It's one more frustration to go along with everything else. 

0:31:42 - David Williams
Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's one more frustration to go along with everything else. Yeah yeah, exactly, let's talk about AI a little bit, so I got to imagine that AI is going to play an important role, but how do you think about it today and what's the future possibility? 

0:31:58 - Dougal Hawes
I personally feel very, very positive and excited about the impact of AI on our industry. 

I think that it has the potential to be one of the great AI for good stories. 

You know, amongst all the fears around AI, clearly we have to be really careful that AI is not being used to put words in the mouths of AAC users, and that's something, as we're looking at the technology we're just being very aware of, and we're definitely in a space at the moment where we're exploring how best to implement the large language models into our software to, you know, help people communicate more efficiently, right. 

But the other thing we're seeing is there's all kinds of ways AI can be used to do other things in software that could be really beneficial, and I already mentioned that these are technologies that we are borrowing and then into our field and then really benefiting people that need AAC, that need AAC, and so our platform has always been a kind of a place where we can integrate different technologies and then provide them all through one platform, and one of the most exciting things right now is with the voices that we're providing, so the voice cloning technology that you may well have heard about in the media is enabling those people diagnosed with ALS to find a clip of video or um, you know any any audio about a minute long. 

You upload that to the site and then you get a voice. Before this latest development, it was a case that you would have to select your voice from you know. Maybe you'd have 10 yeah, american male accents and you had to choose one of those. And it's not you and there's so much of your identity is in your voice. If you shut your eyes and hear a voice of someone you know, you can pick it out straight away. So I think this sort of thing is really important and it helps humanize our technology, which, again, I think will have a major impact. So I'm so excited to see how this helps push forward with the understanding acceptance of AAC. 

0:34:09 - David Williams
Great. Now you've really touched on some interesting spots that we'll have to follow up in a year or two and see what direction it's going. Let me ask you another question about. All that you're doing is focused on AAC, but your technology covers a lot of different areas. Have you thought about areas like are there adjacencies to AAC where a similar kind of approach might work? What might those be, and how would you think about whether you spent time on them? 

0:34:38 - Dougal Hawes
Yeah, we do some sort of parallel but connected markets, so the ones that come to mind something called environment control, which is essentially home automation for people that have disabilities um so, uh, you know, if somebody's unable to use their tv remote or reach up and hit a light switch, then you can use a device to you know, especially adapted device to to do those things. So that's something we've done a lot of historically. More recently and actually we just got a big launch of this um in september is a a push into schools. So using the platform that has communication at its heart, but using that platform for teaching and learning and making an accessible platform for the classroom. So we've already seen unbelievable appetite in schools that need something that you know, particularly when there's schools that focus on supporting people with disabilities an accessible platform that can be tailored to suit the very specific learning needs of that individual, but also the access needs and the multi-platform and everything else. 

So that's that's really exciting for us. Having said that, you know, our big vision and our big mission is all around AAC and making sure that no one is left without a voice. 

0:36:00 - David Williams
Great. So my final question is regarding books and if you've had a chance to read any interesting books lately, anything that you would recommend to our audience. 

0:36:13 - Dougal Hawes
Yes, good question, I'm going to keep it really AAC focused here. So last week I was in Germany. We have a large team providing AAC in Germany and they were having their annual staff event and a guy who was born in South Africa called Martin Pistorius and his story. He came to talk at the event and I'll tell you a little bit more in a moment. But he, his story is he when he was about 12 years old he contracted meningitis and it left him unable to communicate, unable to really move his body, and he was people at the time just thought there wasn't anything going on in his brain and he was just sort of being cared for, you know, in a home. Anyway, what happened was, as he sort of came out of that state, it was an aromatherapist that could sense that he there was quite a lot going on in his brain and he started him off on a journey that led to him discovering and using AAC. Um, coming out of that care home he went on to I don't want to read the book uh, have quite an incredible life. 

He now lives in the UK and last week he travelled independently. He's in a wheelchair, he uses AAC, doesn't speak German. He flew, he drove to the airport, he flew over to Frankfurt. He ended up in the wrong airport. He had to get a bus, then a train to the middle of Germany to meet a team of people he had never met before. He did all of that without, uh, being able to speak other than using his device. So Martin Pistorius and he wrote this book called Ghost Boy, and whenever somebody starts a smart box, we always say you've got to read this book. It's absolutely give you the biggest why behind your decision to join our company. So anyone, I highly recommend it. It's been a big bestseller, so I'm not the only one to think that. 

0:38:06 - David Williams
Excellent, All right. Well, Dougal Hawes, Group CEO of Smartbox Assistive Technology. Thank you for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. Thank you very much. You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, David Williams, President of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.