Year
2025
Recognition
Top 15% Finalist
Team (L-R): Lacey Martin, Luz Vicuna, Me, Danielle Wallace
Mentors: Darryl Hollar, John Winkleman, David Rosenthal
I was the only undergraduate finalist!
The Challenge
Columbia Business School hosts an AI Impact Competition annually, a month-long start-up challenge to propose a pre-launch idea. Finalists pitch in front of VC investors and professionals from a16z, Bain, Google Gradient Ventures, and more. There are four tracks, and my team decided to enter the health care track. The task was to propose an AI-driven solution for your given track, with emphasis on the technical approach.
The Status Quo
In the summer of 2021, I interned at a speech therapy clinic in Hong Kong, where I spent three months training under speech-language pathologists to support children with Selective Mutism and Social Anxiety Disorder. I observed therapy sessions, led behavior reinforcement exercises, and helped design exposure therapy activities tailored to each child.
Over time, I noticed a clear gap: once the children left our clinic, there was no structured way to monitor their speech progress or reinforce therapeutic techniques at home. The system lacked a structured way to meaningfully connected outside of sessions.
Pitch Deck
Our process involved extensive literature review, collaborative ideation sessions, user interviews with speech-language-pathologists, iterative prototyping, and feedback sessions about clinical integration with mentors.
Our Solution
Sori is an AI-powered storybook app that detects speech abnormalities and tracks a child's performance over time. Children use the AI chatbot to generate their own story plots and characters, creating personalized storybooks embedded with phonemic structures designed to assess speech patterns seamlessly. After each reading session, results are sent directly to the child’s speech-language pathologist, enabling more tailored and responsive treatment plans. Ultimately, Sori makes the therapy process more fun and personalized to each child.
Source: Communication Station
Demo
Sori: AI-powered storybooks for speech pathology
How should we design clinican-AI co-intelligence to personalize speech therapy?