About Bonnie

My name is Bonnie and I'm a speech-language pathologist and I'm also a classroom instructor. I have the privilege of working with the amazingly diverse population of Deaf and hard-of-hearing college students in my role as a speech-language pathologist.

Learn more about Bonnie and how she uses Ava:

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How has Ava helped your life?

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I care about communication and effective communication and connecting with others in a meaningful way so I'm constantly on the lookout for new tools and resources and communication strategies that may be out there that I can then pass along to my students to consider is options to add to their a toolkit of communication strategy.

We were excited to explore the idea of Ava because there's definitely a need and a frustration among my students and the challenges they face when it comes to interacting with a group of hearing individuals and trying to keep up with that spoken communication and those conversations where topics tend to shift rapidly and speech reading is nearly impossible when you have multiple people speaking at the same time.

So this was an exciting resource!

A few things that I like about Ava are first of all it's the convenience the convenience of being able to pull out a resource that's right in your pocket or your purse and the reality that in the likelihood that nearly everybody around you probably has their smart device with them so it's a great solution for when you find yourself in a communication situation where you need something last minute or right away on the spot I like that.

I also appreciate the visual cues that in a lot it allows for and provides the user to more quickly and smoothly follow along with the text as it's transcribed. Color codes with different users speech in different color patterns so you're able to see who said what and in real time it does highlight the speech that's being produced in that moment which is another great asset for being able to follow along with the speech that's happening in that moment.

Perhaps my favorite feature is a by product of when you use it really does create a sort of buy-in from all of the communication partners around the table or wherever you may be meaning that the hearing individuals as they open up the app on their phone they're contributing to the partnership of ensuring that communication is clear. If you can get them convinced to download the app and open it up and be mindful that everybody is using this strategy together it creates more camaraderie and I think levels the playing field with who's responsible for the communication success and it puts the ones in the ownership on everybody around the table and that's great my classroom.