Why I built SpeakAnyWay (from our house to yours)

Every company origin story cleans up nicely in the retelling. Mine starts in a kitchen with a kid who needed to tell me something and couldn’t, and a mom who couldn’t fix it — so let me tell it mostly un-cleaned-up.

The problem on our counter

My adventure into AAC began out of necessity and love, when I realized how hard it was for my son — who is on the autism spectrum — to just tell us what he needed or felt. Not the big philosophical things. Juice. Hurts. Done. Outside. The Tuesday things.

We did what every family does: we looked at the available tools. And the available tools were, to put it kindly, not built for us. The good ones cost more than our mortgage payment. The affordable ones felt like homework — screens of settings, manuals, training videos, a part-time job of configuration before a single word got spoken. Everything seemed designed for a clinic with a budget line, not a family with a kitchen counter and a kid who needed words now.

I remember thinking: this should be simple. This should be accessible. Someone should build the version for actual families.

Rolling up my sleeves

Here’s where I got lucky: I’m a software engineer. So “someone should build it” had an obvious, terrifying answer.

I rolled up my sleeves and started building the app I wished someone had handed me — something a family like mine could use without breaking the bank, without a training course, without waiting. I wanted a tool that felt more like a friend than a piece of technology. Boards you could make in minutes. A voice that worked on the tablet already in the house. A price that never made a parent choose between communication and groceries.

That’s how SpeakAnyWay was born — from a mom’s desire to help her child speak his way.

What “his way” taught me

The name isn’t decoration. The deepest thing my boys have taught me — I’m a mom of two nonspeaking, AAC-using kids now, so the lessons kept coming — is that communication was never the same thing as speech. My sons communicate constantly: with taps and symbols, with gestures, with the particular way one of them brings me his shoes like a legal summons. AAC didn’t give them something they lacked. It gave the rest of the world a way to hear what was already there.

So “speak any way” is the entire belief system in three words. Any way that works. Everyone’s voice matters — that’s not our slogan so much as our house rules, shipped as software.

Why we run it the way we do

Because this company came from our kitchen, some decisions were never really decisions:

It has to be affordable. No one should have to pay a premium to communicate. There’s a free plan that does real work because the family we built this for — us, a few years ago — needed exactly that.

It has to be simple. Every feature gets the kitchen-counter test: can a exhausted parent use this at 6pm while dinner burns? If not, it’s not done.

It has to fit real life. Our features come from actual Tuesdays — boards from a photo because we stood in a restaurant needing one, sharing with grandparents because our grandparents needed it too.

From our house to yours

SpeakAnyWay is still a small family company. I’m excited — genuinely, still — every time it lands in a new home and helps give a voice to someone whose words were just out of reach. If that’s your family: this was built for you, by someone who’s been at your kitchen counter. Come say hi, try it free, and tell me what your Tuesday needs.

Together, let’s make sure everyone can express themselves and connect with the world around them. Any way that works.

— Brittany