Generative AI for Therapy? Opportunities and Barriers for ChatGPT in Speech-Language Therapy

Yao Du, Felix Juefei-Xu

Keywords: Speech-Language Therapy, Disability, ChatGPT, Large-Language Models, Generative AI

TL;DR: This paper discusses the opportunities and barriers for ChatGPT in speech-language therapy

Abstract: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are health professionals who work with children and adults with various communication disorders in areas such as speech, language, hearing, and voice. The rise of voice assistants and chatbots brings new opportunities for SLPs and points to new opportunities and barriers when adopted during clinical service delivery. This paper explores the potential adoption of ChatGPT in speech-language therapy for individuals with receptive and expressive language disorders. By offering SLP critique for ChatGPT's responses to multiple therapeutic use cases, limitations and solutions for improving generative AI tools for speech-language therapy are also discussed.