Why I Built FluentPlay

I’ve stuttered since I was eight years old.

FluentPlay began as both a question and a pursuit... could science and engineering be harnessed not to “fix” speech, but to understand it with the same precision we bring to any complex system?

Before I studied speech, I studied flow, literal flow: pressure, timing, and yield in chromatography and tangential-flow filtration systems. In bioprocessing, every valve, every pump, every pressure differential matters. When a chromatography skid builds pressure, you don’t discard the system; you analyze it, find the resistance point, and adjust the flow to restore stability.

That’s how I began seeing speech. Each person’s voice is its own molecular system. It's dynamic, variable, and responsive to subtle changes in timing and pressure. FluentPlay is the bioreactor: a closed-loop platform tuned to each individual’s physiology, learning their rhythms and adapting to maintain a steady state of fluency. When speech becomes turbulent, the goal isn’t to force control; it’s to understand why the system drifted and how to bring it back into balance.

Our work isn’t just about creating a therapeutic device. It’s a scientific exploration of how modern AI and machine learning can evolve when guided by new physiological insights. FluentPlay examines what happens when computational models meet the real-time dynamics of speech, how predictive algorithms, trained on millisecond-level signals, can learn from the body’s timing patterns and offer adaptive feedback faster than conscious awareness.

By merging neuroscience, bioengineering, and speech-language pathology, FluentPlay transforms the study of speech fluency into a living systems experiment. It’s precision science applied to human rhythm. The aim isn’t to manufacture uniform fluency; it’s to empower those who wish to explore fluency as an option, supported by transparent data, voluntary participation, and clinical guidance.

This is what FluentPlay stands for: understanding complexity through compassion, curiosity, and control theory. In bioreactors or in speech, stability comes from insight, not force. And the more precisely we measure the human system, the more gracefully we can help it perform.