Dougherty Valley Seniors Create Speech Coaching App

SAN RAMON, CA - Two rising seniors at Dougherty Valley High School have developed an award-winning speech therapy app.

Neel Kondapalli and Shreyas Sambara have created Speech Splendid, an app that provides semantic and expressional feedback to help people struggling with their speech confidence and performance. Kondapalli and Sambara created algorithms that analyze speech and facial data in real time. Users can upload a speech, and receive immediate, personalized feedback on intonation, emotion and facial expressions.

“Public speaking anxiety affects a considerable portion of the population, with studies reporting its prevalence in 15% to 30% of individuals,” the developers said in a statement, noting that traditional speech therapy can cost thousands of dollars. “Our app's semantic and expressional feedback helps users improve speech confidence and performance, making it a valuable tool for individuals across various walks of life. We offer behavioral and entity-based analysis that few other speech coaching applications have, and are currently working on expanding our app’s capabilities and feedback pathways.”

Speech Splendid has performed well at a number of large competitions, including receiving 2nd place and Best Use of NLP (‘Natural Language Processing’) at RoboHackIT 2022, and finalist status at the 2022-23 Sustainability and Community AI Fair.

Kondapalli and Sambara are preparing to launch the app on the iOS app store.