When the Conversation Doesn’t Wait

I have lived most of my life experiencing ‘the timer’. Years ago, I worked for a newspaper, where the barriers were the physical kind, an accessible parking bay that often non-disabled employees parked in, a building with an accessible toilet that I had to go back down a step to get to and then wade through customers waiting at reception, and phones I couldn’t use due to my speech impairment. Those barriers are visible to the naked eye, but this other barrier is more of a stealth one. It’s the speed of a conversation you are trying to contribute to in real time. It doesn’t show up in an accessibility audit, but it surfaces when the room around you has moved on a few paces. It’s like walking through a space where a thousand voices are chattering together, then you are unable to speak to the person next to you in the moment.

So when I tell people I’ve opted in to using Artificial Intelligence in my communication, and that I use Smartbox’s Smart Prompt*, that I use an AI voice, I know what some of them hear. The debate around AI in AAC is fierce, and not for nothing. Transparency, consent, whose words are these really. Those are questions and I don’t wave them away, I embrace them. I think AI in this area has to be legal, ethical, and always accessible. I think we should keep arguing about what each of those words has to mean, and as a competent wordsmith, I’m not here to sell you a frictionless future.

But here’s what I’ve discovered, and it’s not what I expected to find. The worry people have about AI in a disabled person’s voice is almost always a worry about authenticity. Will it sound like you, or will it make you sound too generic. Is the machine putting words in your mouth, and it’s a reasonable fear. I understand where it comes from.

The version of me that builds every sentence from scratch, letter by letter, while the banter races ahead, that wasn’t the authentic me. That was me with the timing barrier firmly in place. Timing is not a decoration on a personality. For a lot of us it is the personality. The joke works because the punchline hits at a specific moment, the witty answer, and the energy within that moment. When you strip the speed out the ‘moment’ isn’t quite the same.

I’m still in the early days with Smart Prompt, genuinely exploring my way around the tool. I can honestly say it’s the most useful tool I have found for the life I lead, which is one that moves between different types of conversations all day. I can go into a school for an author talk with quick answers ready for the questions I relatively know the children will ask. There’s a chat switcher that lets me have two conversations at any one time. I used it recently mentoring another AAC user, helping him to write his own book, switching between prompting him with disability and lifestyle questions and our live conversation without losing what I had previously typed. The tone tools are the part I’ve come to like most, turning a few keywords into relaxed, natural-sounding banter, in something close to real time, instead of assembling the whole feeling one word at a time.

I don’t want to leave you thinking speed is the whole story, because it isn’t. There’s another part of my creativeness where slowness isn’t a barrier at all; it’s part of the method. I co-lead an initiative called the Word Groove Collective with creative director and songwriter Clary Saddler, a creative team redefining how songs get written. We bring together disabled and non-disabled songwriters and musicians, and we build songs using assistive technologies like eyegaze and switch devices. These are communication and access tools, not AI-generative composition tools. Every song we write is human-made, and we’ve written songs to music-industry briefs sent to us from all around the world.

Nothing in our process is fast; it isn’t meant to be. The song takes exactly as long as it takes, and the taking-its-time is where the magic happens. It isn’t that speed is good and slowness is bad. It’s that I want to be the one who decides which the moment needs; rather than my disability deciding it for me.

None of that is my TalkPad 8 and Smart Prompt replacing me. It’s the tool moving in the right direction to handing me back the tempo I have been locked out of all these years. I don’t have a cloned voice yet. I use a pre-recorded AI voice, and I don’t mind it, though maybe, one day, there’ll be a voice that sounds closer to mine. Writing my first book was where I started what I’ve called an open road to self-acceptance. The stretch I’m on now feels like that same road, just a different surface travelling in the same direction.

So, let’s keep the debate going, because it’s a valuable one. But I’d ask the people having it to notice who’s usually in the room. The question of whether AI belongs in a disabled person’s identity tends to be decided by the people who haven’t experienced being left behind by the speed of an ordinary conversation, or who have never watched the moment they wanted to own before they could reach it.

I’ve experienced it many times, and I’d quite like to be in the conversation while it’s all happening.