AI speech and language rehabilitation
Aphonos builds conversational software for people who lost their language to a stroke. A consumer companion today, on a defined path toward a prescription digital therapeutic for post-stroke aphasia.
áphonos · Greek · voiceless
The problem
Aphasia is the loss of language following a stroke or brain injury. It affects more people than Parkinson's disease, cerebral palsy, or muscular dystrophy. Most people have never heard of it.
Existing tools either digitise traditional drills or help patients compensate for lost language. None of them is built around who the patient actually is, and none has been taken through the FDA as a treatment for aphasia.
That is the gap Aphonos is building into.
Our approach
Aphonos combines conversational AI, pre-stroke identity personalisation, and a caregiver layer into a single platform, built from the ground up for this patient population and grounded in established aphasia treatment approaches.
Every session is shaped by who the patient was before their stroke: their career, family, hobbies, and life. This is not a feature. It is the architecture.
Practice adapts in real time to the person's severity, fatigue and progress, structured around Semantic Feature Analysis, constraint-induced language therapy and script training.
After every session, families receive a clear summary and practical guidance. Recovery is a team effort. We built the platform that way from day one.
Pipeline
A consumer wellness product is live today. The clinical programs behind it are headed for a different bar entirely. The dashed line is where that changes, and nothing to the right of it is authorised yet.
| Program | Indication and intended use | Route |
Research &
discovery Development &
feasibility Clinical validation
pivotal RCT Regulatory
submission Authorised /
listed Reimbursed &
available |
|---|---|---|---|
| APH‑101 Aphasia.ai companion | Chronic post-stroke aphasia. Daily conversational language practice at home. General wellness. No clinical claim. | General wellness Not a medical device |
|
| APH‑102 Clinician companion | Between-session practice data for the treating speech-language pathologist. General wellness. No clinical claim. | General wellness Not a medical device |
|
| APH‑201 Unnamed | Post-stroke aphasia, naming and connected speech. Intended as an adjunct to clinician-supervised speech-language therapy. | US · De Novo Anticipated. No predicate device exists |
NIDCD SBIR Phase I |
| APH‑301 Unnamed | Post-stroke aphasia. German statutory reimbursement market. | DE · DiGA, CE IIa Planned |
|
Regulatory pathway and device classification are subject to FDA feedback, and any study qualifying as pivotal is subject to FDA feedback and review of data. Programs in research and development are not FDA-cleared, not FDA-authorised, and are not available for prescription. APH‑101 and APH‑102 are general wellness products. They are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate or prevent any disease.
The consumer product
A conversational companion for stroke survivors and their families, available directly with no clinical referral. It is where people practise talking on the days they are not in a clinic.
It also does something strategic. Real conversational interaction at home generates the engagement and usability evidence that a feasibility study needs, which is what de-risks the clinical program behind it.
Visit Aphasia.ai →Evidence and collaborators
An early company's credibility is the checkable part. Named collaborators, named methods, and a regulatory position we can defend, rather than user counts.
A feasibility study is planned with an academic aphasia centre as the study site, with a named speech-language pathologist as collaborator. We will name the site and the investigator here once the collaboration is announced.
Application submitted to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, September 2026.
There is no FDA-cleared predicate device for aphasia treatment. The existing digital therapeutic classifications are indication-locked, including 21 CFR 882.5801, which is limited on its face to psychiatric conditions.
The anticipated route for APH‑201 is therefore a De Novo classification request, which would open the category and set the special controls every subsequent product has to meet.
Streaming speech recognition tuned for disordered speech, a two-layer language model architecture, and a session record designed for clinical review from the start.
Speech recognition is never the only input. Every exercise has a parallel path that does not depend on the system understanding what was said.
Get in touch
Whether you're an investor, a speech-language pathologist, a clinical researcher, or exploring a partnership, we'd like to hear from you.