Who are you and what do you want? Why are you here? What’s in it for you? These are all natural questions when one arrives to a community out of the blue offering something new apparently “for sale.” I get it. And, that’s the situation in which I find myself, so let me endeavor to answer some of these and to share my motive and my motivation.
Who are you?
First, a little bit about me might be helpful. I made my career as a health care consultant for the last 22-ish years working to make health care more accessible for people and to make the experience easier and more, in the words of one client, more remarkable. Though, admittedly, I always pushed back against the concept of “remarkable” because I always believed that the best health care experience would be one that was the least “remarkable.” I researched the topic of patient experience and wrote about it at some length and in lots of places over many years, and I built and led an entire successful practice focused on assisting health care clients to transform their businesses to become more consumer-oriented. This was an area of focus in health care that covered a lot of ground. I advised clients on experience design, digital strategy, innovation, corporate strategy, and the future of health.
I was a health care strategist, and my passion for putting people at the center of the experience of their own health care journey has always fueled the work that I have done. I never imagined that in 2024, I would be the person at the center of my own complicated health care journey that would lead to a diagnosis of ALS in December of that year.
Why are you here?
When I was first diagnosed, I noticed issues with my speech. As someone who processes the world out loud, I became fixated on what people do when they lose the ability to speak. I began to research the solutions that people use; I wanted to know what my best options were, and I assumed that we would have several great solutions available with high-quality voice clones and integrated artificial intelligence. I was…disappointed…with what I found. The quality of the voice technology primarily in use was predominantly not leveraging the best available technology, and I almost no use (if any, quite frankly) of artificial intelligence being used to mitigate the level of effort required of the user to input text for conversion to speech.
As I dug more into this, I reflected on my many years of advising on innovation in health care, and the reasons for a lack of innovation in this space started to become clearer to me. Innovation in health care is often stymied by risk aversion. In my career, I often found clients wanting to try something new only when “the evidence showed” that the new approach was better than the status quo. The reality is that if one never tries a new approach, there will never be any evidence to show that the new approach is better than the status quo, and one can be stuck with a paradox. I wondered if that is where we were. There are a small number of “proven” solutions on the market, and, frankly, change is hard, expensive, and risky. The incentives aren’t aligned behind innovation. So, we end up asking people to settle for less than what is possible. The current solutions “worked,” but…so, this was my motivation. I wasn’t satisfied, and I wondered if I could create something that leveraged better technology to address four big questions:
- Can we improve the quality of output by leveraging the best voice technology available?
- Can we make the solution available on consumer-grade devices available to everyone?
- Can we use artificial intelligence in a scalable way to mitigate the level of effort required for users to input the text they want thereby improving adoption, increasing the quality of community, enhancing human-centricity, and reducing caregiver fatigue & turnover?
- Can we make this available scalably, sustainably, and free to people living with disabilities to disrupt the status quo?
I had never built anything from scratch in my life. I was a strategist in health care, not a developer. While I had some experience leading a team in the development of a solution a number of years back, and I certainly have always been curious about technology, I hadn’t ever architected and built a solution from the ground up. But, I was faced with an uncertain deadline. How long would my speech last? How much time did I have with my fingers to type? Could I even pull this off? I had a purpose and focus, and I figured that I had nothing to lose if I just tried. Armed with what I learned in a few classes online, a good Google game, and a lot of well-framed questions of Co-pilot, Claude and Gemini, I got started. My journey was filled with a lot of false starts, mis-steps, errors, laughs, lessons learned and even a few triumphs along the way. But, in a few short months, I had a working solution that was ready to launch as version 1 in the Apple App Store, and the next leg of the race began – finding partners.
What do you want?
We launched the solution on March 26, 2025 after just 80 days of development, and when we launched, because there is a relatively substantial cost to support the underlying technical infrastructure for data management, identity management, security, artificial intelligence, and voice technology, and because to make the solution available on the Apple App Store, it is effectively available to the world to download for free, we had to put some pricing structure around it to protect our financial downside while we worked through the process of finding the right partners and mechanisms of making this solution available to the people who might benefit from it for free. This was not easy, but it is what I wanted.
It was my belief that with the right solution and the right partners, we could build a sustainable model to make Talk to Me, Goose! available to people who might benefit from it for free, but to do that, we had to protect against anyone anywhere in the world just downloading the solution and burning through our pocketbooks by running up costs not aligned with our purpose. So, that is why we put pricing structures and subscription models around the solution in the App Store. We needed the ability to make the solution available, but there had to be some insurance against a “bad actor,” so to speak, using the solution to deplete our financial reserves.
In October of this year, we were thrilled to announce our partnership with the Live Like Lou Foundation that we are able to offer Talk to Me, Goose! to people and families living with ALS in the United States and Canada for free. This was my objective from the start. We can do that through an established process with the foundation by which we give each family a grant for the solution to purchase the solution through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store to use without any limitation whatsoever. For people who have an ElevenLabs voice clone, this is a $159.99 value, and for people who do not yet have an ElevenLabs voice clone, this is a $359.99 value, if one were to purchase these on the App Store or Google Play Store. Again, because these apps are available for download to anyone in the world, without this pricing there, I would be paying for everyone in the world to use the app for free which is not something that I wanted to sign up for. This at least puts some “counter-incentive” to a bad actor, and, unfortunately, the world is full of bad actors.
What’s in it for me?
Well, I suppose that is a good question. If I just give this way, how is it sustainable? How can I make a lasting impact on the community if this isn’t sustainable? What happens if it fails? These are all very good questions, so let me lay out my thinking.
We have started a small company, and it is, indeed a for profit organization called Mundell Designs LLC. Our objective is NOT to make a profit from the sale of Talk to Me, Goose!
I have one of two objectives for Talk to Me, Goose! Either we continue to iterate, improve and scale the solution to as many people as possible around the globe who would benefit from it by making it available on ubiquitous consumer-grade devices for low or no cost, or we use it to drive the existing incumbent players to innovate their solutions sufficiently quickly to make their solutions better, more accessible and cheaper to the people that need them. You see, I think that we’ve been asking people living with ALS, and speech disabilities more generally, to settle for sultions that are represent far less than what is possible for far too long. The technology available to us today is too relatively inexpensive and too pervasive for there to be barriers to access for people. And, there are simply, too many unnecessary barriers today.
How do we make this sustainable?
We have launched a second product, Fable’s Adventures, targeted at a much broader audience that is intended (and, I hope) will, in fact, drive the revenue necessary to build a business sufficient to support the mission. Fable’s Adventures was an outgrowth of the Story Builder feature built, initially, for Talk to Me, Goose! to enable people living with ALS to be able to tell stories in their own voice. I enjoyed building and telling stories so much that I thought that it might have legs to stand on its own and serve a broader audience. And, so far, it has built a little bit of a following, and it’s growing…slowly, but it’s growing.
What’s your motivation?
I’ll return to where I started. I had a successful career serving health care organizations across the country, putting people at the center of their health care journey, and I saw the power that had when we did it right. That is my motivation here. I want to put you back at the center of your own journey. I want to give you your voice back, and give you your autonomy, agency and dignity back when this disease is taking so much else away from us as it does. It is a privilege to get to do this. It keeps me moving even as moving is getting harder and a little more slow. And, in the words of Hanna duPlessis from her wonderful book, “Bedsores and Bliss: Finding Fullness of Life with a Terminal Diagnosis” – I will use every ounce of agency available to me to respond to this boa constrictor with creativity and push more life into the world.
What’s next?
I’m incredibly honored, extremely humbled, super nervous but also excited that I’m going to be presenting Talk to Me, Goose! at the United Nations in Vienna in February as part of the Zero Project Conference. You see, the solution was awarded a Zero Project Award for 2026 and recognized as an innovative solution that reduces barriers for people living with disabilities.
At the conference, my intention is to seek out opportunities to engage with technology and funding partners to find additional opportunities similar to the partnership that we have with the Live Like Lou Foundation to make Talk to Me, Goose! available to people living with speech disabilities around the globe. We believe that there are 97 million people globally living with speech disabilities who lack access to a technology solution that would benefit but due to cost or language barriers are unable to gain access. Talk to Me, Goose! currently works in 31 languages, and if we can find the right partners, there is no reason that we cannot bridge that gap today because, again, in the spirit of the words of Hanna duPlessis, while I grieve with abandon all that I have lost, I choose instead to focus on all that is possible.