In September 2026, two deaf baristas began using Vocoda AI to communicate with customers at a coffee stand in Bandung, Indonesia. Originally developed by Ambassadors for commercial voice production, the technology had found a new application beyond advertising.

The story began three years earlier, when an attendee at a Vocoda presentation asked whether the technology could help her friend’s mother, Dolly, who was gradually losing her ability to speak.

Dolly was living with a form of ALS, a progressive neurological disease that was affecting her speech. She could still communicate through writing and typing, so the team explored whether they could preserve her voice and find a way for her to continue using it. They invited Dolly to record her voice as soon as possible, since the illness had already begun to affect her speech. To compensate, the team blended her recordings with those of her daughter, whose voice had a similar character but faster speech, and developed several voice options for the family to choose from. Using Vocoda’s voice technology and a custom interface built by developers at Cube, the team created an application that allowed Dolly to type messages and hear them spoken in her own voice. It was developed alongside their regular projects, with the team helping Dolly get comfortable using it. Dolly used the application daily for approximately two years until she passed away.

After her passing, there were no immediate plans to develop the app further. That changed when John de Jong proposed adapting the application for use in Indonesia.

Born in Bandung, Indonesia, John had learned about the project through his son-in-law, Ambassadors CIO Diederik Veelo. Having seen how communication barriers could limit employment opportunities for deaf people and people with speech disabilities in Indonesia, John wondered whether the application could be adapted to help.

He gathered a small group of people who shared his ambition, and through their network, John connected with the West Java Social Affairs Department and its Griya Harapan Difabel center in Cimahi, which supports the empowerment, rehabilitation, and social inclusion of people with disabilities.

Working with the center, the team started testing the application with a new group of users. Unlike Dolly, who was accustomed to typing complete sentences, many of the young people at the center primarily communicated through sign language, which follows a different grammatical structure from written Indonesian. Some would type short phrases such as "yesterday shopping" rather than "yesterday I went shopping," reflecting how they were used to expressing their thoughts.

To accommodate these differences, the team added a language model that turns a few typed keywords into suggested sentences. Users can then choose the one that best captures what they want to say. With the adjustments in place for the app’s new users, the next step was to put it to the test. John proposed coffee bars as a practical starting point, giving participants opportunities to develop job skills and interact with customers. For the Indonesian version, the local Vocoda team recorded male and female voices with regional speech characteristics and introduced customizable phrases for common customer interactions. Speech-to-text allows the baristas to read customers’ questions and orders, while their typed replies are spoken aloud.