Finding AI and Emerging Tech Solutions for Disability Professionals with Leila Denna Staiger

James Berges 00:01 
AI is moving so fast, if you haven't noticed. What felt revolutionary six months ago is already old news.

At my health tech company, Mai Ling, I went from secretly worrying about telling coworkers I was using AI, and now we're all expected to be AI natives, so we have these weekly groups that we get together and talk about how we're using AI. And we polled our community of psychiatrists, for example, on 78% are already using AI to help them take notes during clinical sessions. 

Mai Ling Chan 00:28 
It's amazing. And this means that if you don't understand technology, you're going to get left behind.

And our guest today, Leila Denna Staiger, she saw this gap early and did something about it. And she's creating SLPs, TalkTech, a community that didn't exist before to discuss topics that didn't exist before. 

Leila Denna Staiger 00:49 
After I started talking more about authenticity, that's when I actually felt like I can't keep doing this investigation alone. I need other people to talk to, and I want to start talking to people who are not my current colleagues, but people who maybe I want to be colleagues with in this space. 

Mai Ling Chan 01:10 
Welcome to the Exceptional Leaders Podcast. I'm Mai Ling Chan, and together with James Burgess, we're getting you top tips and resources for building and scaling your disability-focused offerings straight from the forefront of disability advocacy and leadership. 

James Berges 01:29 
Leila's journey started like most of ours, playing with chat GPT to write greeting cards and funny country songs in my case. But as a speech-language pathologist working at the intersection of technology and disability, she quickly realized something crucial was missing, and that was guidance, research, and ethical frameworks for using AI in clinical practice. 

Mai Ling Chan 01:48 
Yes. And what really struck me about Leila's approach is her boldness. I love it. She's like my kind of girl.

She literally cold emailed every presenter who spoke about AI at the National ASHA Convention, which is the American Speech Language Hearing Association. And she said, let's talk. I mean, that's just so incredible. And that courage to connect to strangers around a shared challenge is exactly how these types of movements start. 

James Berges 02:13 
Yeah, she's starting conversations, and in this conversation, you'll discover how to build a community around emerging technology when no playbook exists and why, quote unquote, human in the loop, that means, you know, taking care of AI so it doesn't run you, is critical. As AI becomes more prevalent, especially in healthcare, you got to be careful.

So like what is going on with the data and how do we use these to be better clinicians and not the other way around? As well as the difference between the AI hype that you hear so much, probably on LinkedIn, and all the slop you see on social media, and what are the actual practical clinical applications of AI? 

Mai Ling Chan 02:52 
So true. And you're using all of the buzzwords. I love it.

Human in the loop. I use that in my presentations. I've seen AI slop. And so for our listener, you are now in with the jargon. I love that. And that is really, it's becoming more and more that you read something and you're like, oh my gosh, this is so AI generated. And then it just tanks someone's credibility. And that's actually what I talk about a lot when I'm doing presentations to within our profession, AI for SLPs. But Layla actually, she represents something that we're seeing across healthcare. And that's clinicians like us who understand that this AI technology is not going away. And we really need to get involved on how to shape and, and direct how it's being used responsibly. 

James Berges 03:34 
Yeah, the irony is it's just a collective of all of our input, so if we don't take careful steps right now, it's just going to be a derivative thing that, you know, doesn't really serve us. And we have to have real human conversations about what we want that direction to look like, which I know you're doing that in the AISLP group, Mayling, and you have your exceptional leaders group.

So it's great that along with Layla, that there's people talking about this, especially clinicians who are big on ethics. Thank you for that. 

Mai Ling Chan 04:00 
I love it. And I think what you're bringing up is that there's been a shift back to community. I think these like after COVID, I mean, we're so far beyond that now, but people are going back to these in-person events. I've seen that more and more.

And yes, there's a virtual component, you know, for the people who can't make it, but people want to connect. And I think that's where the real value and the strength is moving forward is, yes, we have AI, we can use it in the behind the scenes types of things, but in the real content creation, and especially when we're talking about within clinical application, you have got to have this human connection. And again, that's, that's my soapbox that I keep getting on. And so you mentioned the exceptional leaders group, James, we just celebrated our one year anniversary. And I'm so excited that we are going to be, yeah, thank you. And we're going to be adding every week is an open discussion or an open like forum where people come on and they share who they are, what they're working on, what they need, and what they can share. And we just tested that at the celebration this week. And it was phenomenal.

I mean, just the outpouring of support and the, oh, I need to follow you and I need to connect with you. And I was like, yes, that's what I've been talking about. You know, that's, that's the secret sauce of the exceptional leaders network. And it just comes back down to basic human connection. 

James Berges 05:17 
Yeah. Can AI like any other tech help us be more human, not less? And so I love that.

And with that, let's get to our discussion with Leila Dennis Steiger. She's the founder of SLPs TalkTech. She's proving that sometimes the best way to handle an uncertain future, like you're saying, Mayling, is to gather the right people and figure it out together. 

Mai Ling Chan 05:41 
Our guest today is Leila Denna Staiger, and I have been working with her for a good, probably eight months now, on putting together a Facebook group for SLPs about AI. And in the meantime, she's been putting together a group that is really amazing and timely.

And so I'm really excited to have her on the show today because this is one of those things. We are all in an exciting and amazing moment in history when we think about technology and how fast it's growing. So welcome, Leila. 

Leila Denna Staiger 06:10 
Thank you so much for having me, Mai Ling. I'm so happy to be here. 

Mai Ling Chan 06:13 
I'm so excited. OK, so I'm going to let the cat out of the bag. The name of your site and your community is SLPs TalkTech. So for our listener, not everybody who listens is an SLP, we know that.

But what I really do believe is we are all now being touched by what's going on with AI in so many ways professionally, personally. And I love leaders like Leila who are coming forward and saying, we need to really talk about this, and we need to create guidelines, and we need to get in front of this. And so the reason I'm having Leila on the show so early is because she is doing two things, which is really fascinating, is she's creating a company, a community that didn't exist before, and she's getting people to talk about topics that didn't exist before. So it's super exciting, super challenging. So Leila, why would you do something like this? 

Leila Denna Staiger 07:08 
Honestly, as the mom of two kids with a full-time job, I ask myself that question often. I was really looking for more people like myself.

I kind of started digging into AI when it came out with chat GPT and writing people greeting cards or country songs about their favorite interests. And then I just started to get more marketing emails in my inbox about AI tools. And as the news cycle really picked up, I started to feel like this is so exciting for someone like me who works in at the intersection of technology and speech pathology. So I think kind of what the SLPs talk tech community is starting to grow into is something that I feel like is still fueled by that same energy where technology is meeting speech pathology. And right now is just such an exciting time for innovation in both areas. So while it might not be the right time for my personal life, it is the right time for professionally these things to intersect. And yeah, I'm a solutions oriented person. So I'm just excited to see what kind of solutions we can get. 

Mai Ling Chan 08:25 
I like that. Okay, so how long have you been immersing yourself in this area of AI and speech language pathology? 

Leila Denna Staiger 08:32 
I would say I kind of hopped on the bandwagon like everyone else. I didn't have this extensive knowledge of AI before chat GPT was released to the public. I wasn't following AI tech trends. I would say like I am now.

I was just a regular citizen who knew something about technology and applied that in my job. And certainly not an AI expert, but when I started kind of peeling back the curtain about what was happening in AI, you know, you just kind of get addicted because there's a ton to learn out there. And I'm just someone who is certainly a lifelong learner and really interested in anything new that comes up in culture and in technology that's related to my field. 

Mai Ling Chan 09:18 
Okay, so let's just give our listeners some dates here. So OpenAI launched probably like November, 2023, which started becoming public. And then we come around last year, February, is about when I started going, ooh, this is something and started looking into it. And my lens has been on the ethical side.

You know, how can we use it ethically in terms of speech pathology and clinical practice in creating materials and integrating with our clients. You have a different lens. And this is what I really love about you and about this group. So can you share a little bit of what you like and how this has moved you into this type of community? 

Leila Denna Staiger 10:00 
Yeah, so I really started looking at chat GPT when it came out in November of 2022 and the following year I actually put in a conference proposal at ATIA, which is a big conference in our community. It's a fantastic place to get knowledge and resources if you're a person with a disability or if you're working disability advocacy or if you're working as a clinician or even an innovator. And so I started talking about, you know, what tools and solutions are kind of out there that actually might be appropriate and applicable for clinicians like myself, right? It was that kind of like, I'm a good use case here.

Let me look at my own caseload and think about what are the ways that I can kind of strategize and innovate with these tools that are free and readily accessible. And after that kind of year of investigating tools and really trying to identify tools for solutions, I actually started to kind of move in the other direction and go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's no guidance coming out. There's no research coming out. There's actually no one kind of standing in the front and saying, this is all interesting and experimental, but here's a policy. Here's a procedure. Here's a way that we should actually be peeling back some of the layers that might be kind of covered by what the technology looks like on the outside. And that's when I really got curious about bias, about kind of the hidden threads of training data and where that training data was coming from.

And the whole copyright lawsuit with OpenAI and Microsoft and the New York Times, there started to be multiple kind of news headlines that really started to capture my attention as a person who's working in the space of disability advocacy, you know, as a clinician. And so those headlines actually really kind of made me turn in a different direction. So then I got very curious about authenticity. And how are we using these tools? But like remaining authentic to either ourselves and we're not giving up our voice by using, you know, a generative language model that's just generating a bunch of information for us. And after I started talking more about authenticity, that's when I actually felt like I can't keep doing this investigation alone. I need other people to talk to and I want to start talking to people who are not my current colleagues, but people who maybe I want to be colleagues with in this space. 

Mai Ling Chan 12:38 
I love that. I'm all about connection. You're thinking, how do I find them? Where did you first start searching? 

Leila Denna Staiger 12:47 
So I think it was actually after ASHA 2024, where I had done a virtual talk and ASHA is the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, happens every year. Typically it's mostly speech-language pathologists or people who were working in CSD in the US, but folks come from Europe or from South America or Central America.

So it's a really great collection of voices and perspectives and it was the first time at ASHA there were so many talks about AI. And so I just decided to kind of look at everyone who was a presenter, find their email address online and just send them an email. And I said, hi, I'm Layla. I also gave a talk about AI at ASHA this year. I'm looking to have more conversations with people like you who are curious about these tools, who are also cautious about the application of these tools. Would you be interested in joining me for some regular chats? It was pretty bold. I sent all these emails from my personal email address and people were really kind and really receptive. 

Mai Ling Chan 13:58 
That's incredible. It takes a lot of courage too.

Not that you can't get no's. You can take no's, but that people were like, yes, I find that Leila is credible and valid and that you are the leader of this. So what made you want to step into this role at this time? 

Leila Denna Staiger 14:16 
I've always been interested in those research-to-practice gaps that are well acknowledged by folks who have worked in the field of communication disorders. And so I felt like, oh, maybe this is a really wonderful opportunity to bring clinicians and researchers closer together by having this central focus of talking about AI in tech.

And we're all learning together, right? I didn't feel like, like I mentioned earlier, I didn't feel like I was more of an AI expert. Then other people were, but we all certainly have our domains of expertise and our skills that we're bringing to the conversation. So I think that I decided to kind of get everyone together. And I actually didn't know at the beginning that they would turn into recurring conversations that I would lead. That's something that just kind of unfolded over a few months of doing the chats. And that was like a very unexpected surprise, but a welcome surprise, too, because amazing. Yeah, I was really able to bring all of my ideas to the table and people were listening. 

Mai Ling Chan 15:24 
Incredible. Okay, so now you're building this. It's called SLP's Talk Tech. You can find it online, slpstalktech.com.

So now you have a thing. It's a thing. If you build it, they will come. So what is the goal? And have you even thought about all of this? 

Leila Denna Staiger 15:38 
I've done a lot of thinking over the last eight months. Our first meeting was at the beginning of January, actually. And thank you for mentioning. I don't even know if I've said the words SLPs talk tech yet, yet. But yes, that is the name. We are called SLPs talk tech. One of the things I've actually been thinking about a lot is the name. Right. Because it's a space for researchers who might actually be working in research that's related to speech language pathology, but perhaps their domain is education or, you know, biosciences. But it's the space for researchers, innovators, scholars, clinicians or just allied health professionals to come together. And as I have really kind of honed in on wanting to specifically stay with this cohort of folks, I've started to kind of ask myself, well, is SLPs talk tech the right name for us? And I think one thing that I'm very excited that I have decided is that it is the right name.

And it's the right name, actually, because I really do believe as a speech language pathologist, we approach technology differently. We approach communication differently. We actually have a whole host of unique, clinically informed perspectives about appropriate technology applications for people who have communication based disabilities. We should be a part of these conversations. So SLPs talk tech, I think, is kind of a way to celebrate the knowledge and experience of SLPs by really using the speech language pathology lens to look at, you know, broad, publicly available technology tools like OpenAI, for example. 

Mai Ling Chan 17:28 
So true. So I've been in on a couple of your calls and it's fascinating the types of people that you have there. They are not just SLPs. So we've seen other people who are like product creators that are maybe an ed tech or health tech. And that's been really interesting because there's been this overlap over the years of these companies and these creators really understanding the value of having a speech language pathologist on their team. So we're really excited about that.

I'm actually part of a presentation at ASHA where we're talking about alternate career options. And there's a number of people like Rachel Levy and Katie Seaver. And oh my gosh, who's the other person? Rachel, Katie, myself, it'll come to me. And we're all coming at it from different lenses of how you can do things beyond speech therapy. But technology is a huge space. And I was so impressed Leila of the type of people who were coming into your conversations. 

Leila Denna Staiger 18:22 
Thank you so much. I mean, again, I think it's been a surprise to me that folks from all a variety of years of experience with a variety of titles are coming and wanting to actually hear, yeah, how are you using these new tools that were rolled out?

And what are the kind of ethical concerns with different domains within speech-language pathology? Because especially, I think when we get comfortable working with a specific caseload, we don't really know what other experts are doing with technology in their field. And so, again, SLP's talk tech gives us this opportunity to dive into technology specifically with the intention of enhancing the way we're using tools and clinical practice combined to meet people's needs. 

Mai Ling Chan 19:14 
Thank you. And I just want to bring it back. It's Rinky Desai. I just wanted to make sure that I add them, and there was just an amazing group of women and people who are on the cutting edge of alternate careers, especially in this new technology and health tech space. If you're like me, you can't get enough of books, podcasts, blogs, and other ways to find out how to create, grow, and scale. That's why I brought together 43 disability-focused leaders to give you more of what you're looking for.

You will hear their stories in three best-selling books, which focus on general offerings, augmentative and alternative communication, and speech-language pathology. I invite you to search for Becoming an Exceptional Leader on Amazon, so you can learn intimate start-up pearls of wisdom and keep growing your brilliant idea. Now, let's get back to our amazing interview. Okay, so much to unpack here in addition to that you're creating this group, but when I think about long-term growth and scaling a company and things like that. This is a classic story. I saw a need, and I started to fill it. What would you say three years, five years from now? What would you like SLP's talk tech to be involved in? 

Leila Denna Staiger 20:29 
Oh man, you know, I think you and I have talked about this before just in kind of our exchanges, but I'm not an entrepreneur. I've never started a business. I've never taken a business class. You know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, but I've never felt like, oh, starting a business and scaling a business is my calling.

And it's something that I have the knowledge and skills to do. But that being said, I have never been so excited to learn about business and how can I apply business strategy to, to what we're doing here. Not because I'm looking for, I think people to pay me to do this work. Like that's actually very important to me. I'm not looking for folks to just pay me to do SLPs, talk tech. I really want to provide value to clinicians. I started out as a clinician and I didn't even know what assistive technology was, even though my passion was AAC. What? Like I, you know, and there's so much to, there's so much to learn about technology. I actually work professionally as an AAC and AT specialist. So I go around to schools, you know, in my geographic location, and I consult with other speech language pathologists for kids who have complex communication needs in their school district. And these are good SLPs. They know what they're doing, but they don't know which application is the right one for a student who has, you know, a proxy of speech or who's struggling with grammar and language or word recall. Like there's so many more applications for AAC besides just someone who is a non-speaking individual. And so exploring all of those threads of technology and clinical practice in my consulting business, you know, in my consulting work that I do and that kind of day-to-day grind makes me think I hope SLPs, talk tech can be a place where folks can come to get resources about technology, educate themselves, upskill with a community, and learn about technology and practice in a way that makes them feel empowered. They know it's ethical. So we're not making clinical mistakes that we can prevent. 

Mai Ling Chan 22:46 
Excellent, excellent. Okay, so I'm gonna do a shameless plug here. Layla is a part of my Exceptional Leaders Network where we do help each other to grow, scale, connect, find resources, all the things to grow your disability-focused company, your brand, write your book, whatever that is. And hopefully our little community is going to be helping Layla to continue to grow, you know, to her three to five-year goals.

But in the interim, I got her to say yes, to be an admin, together with myself and Dr. Michelle Poivare, who is the creator of Easy Report Pro, which is a special education software program that also has an AI component. And then also LaBelle Carlson, who is an amazing OG in the area of writing children's books as a speech language pathologist. And the four of us now have this new Facebook group called AI for the SLP. And we all come to it from different perspectives. So we have someone who is a software creator and a speech language pathologist. We have someone who is really using it prolifically in so many ways. That's LaBelle. I mean, there's so many things that she's doing. She just hired a company to do a chat bot for her website, which is incredible. And then I come at it where I'm at ADHD and I'm just like, oh, look at this news and look at that news. And this is how I think you can use it. And then we have Layla, who I feel like really cements us into, well, what about the research and have you looked at this? And I really do. I feel like you're the grounding foundation for a lot of really good talks on where are we going with this. So why did you say yes to me to create that group? 

Leila Denna Staiger 24:20 
I mean, I think that we need as many kind of creative and unafraid voices as possible at the front who are ready to say, I'm not the expert, but I'm curious about this, let's learn together. And that's actually what I really loved about the dynamic between Michelle and Lavelle and yourself. Being able to sit down with other folks who are ready to learn about something new together is so exciting to me. It's kind of like we're all in a mini school. I feel like we're all, we're giving courses on what we're learning and we're actively learning at the same time.

And I think that right now when there's so much AI news, there's so much information about, there's so much marketing about the magic of AI. It kind of drives me nuts. I feel like it's really getting us off track from being able to have tangible information that's relevant to us as clinicians. So I'm super excited to be a part of the AI for SLP Facebook community so we can share resources with each other. I'm a member of some other Facebook SLP communities that are technology aligned with AAC and research and evidence. And I have learned so much just from being a member of those groups for a number of years. So I'm really excited about the way we can come together as a community of creative professionals ready to share information with each other and make sure that what we're doing with technology does align with evidence-based practice. It's so important to all of us. 

Mai Ling Chan 26:04 
Yes. We're building on our history, and I think that's so important. I've done some larger presentations. I've had the absolute blessing to present to LA Unified School District, and I did polls. What was really interesting is we are still all over the place on how we're using AI. Then we also did a poll in the Facebook group that is asking people, should you tell your clients, do you have to disclose that you are using AI? We're all right now, we have the majority. We have 600 members, and we've only been launched for what, three weeks? Like a few weeks. It's cool.

Yeah. I don't even think it's a month. Of those people who have responded to the poll, we have a majority who are saying, yes, you should disclose, but we still have a pretty good chunk of people that are saying, no, you don't have to tell anybody. It's like, ah. Then I also had the absolute honor to present to the ASHA school board this past week, and there were so many things that I felt like I had to tell them. I only had 40 minutes, and I consulted with you, I consulted Michelle, and I was like, these are all the high level, and there were still 10 more things on my list that I could have said, but I didn't have the time. Hopefully, they'll have me back, but I have asked for them to consider doing some type of task force and giving us real guidelines, because this isn't like using Google. Do you think that we needed guidelines and things for using Google for speech therapy? 

Leila Denna Staiger 27:27 
Right. Right. I mean, it's yeah, the parallels between kind of the digital boom and then even the social media boom. And now with the AI boom, I mean, there's so many parallels that we can draw. 

Mai Ling Chan 27:38 
Yeah. And I just think we just need some type of coordinated guidance. I think that's really what it is.

And then that leaves room for the creatives like me to be like, oh, and you can use this video and this is how you can, you know, um, you can do activities together, but you need these, we're all using the same type of guidelines and frameworks when we create materials. And when we, you know, X, I also think about the app. So I'm going to take you back. I know that you were somebody who was, you know, a user of apps. Um, I am somebody who came from the beeper age, so the apps to me were incredible. And you're a little bit younger than me, but again, with the apps, I never felt like I needed to go to Ash and say, we need guidelines because we were using apps that were created by speech language pathologists and that's just how it was. And at least that's with the apps that I was using, or we were using apps that were ed tech or maybe, um, an app that was a game app had nothing to do with school, but we were using, we knew our best practices for how to incorporate, you know, into activities and things. But this just seems so wild, wild west to me with all of the different softwares that are available and the way that we're interacting. How do you feel about it? 

Leila Denna Staiger 28:45 
I mean, it's tough. I think that we want guidance, but at the same time, the people we want guidance from are not ready to give us guidance, right? So I have a lot of empathy actually for the decision makers right now, because like we said, we are upskilling together.

Are they upskilling together? You know, I mean, I think that when I kind of look at the news, it looks like people who have a lot of corporate professions, the enterprise business is looking at AI differently than I think the education sector or even in healthcare. They're looking at it for the obvious reasons in healthcare. They want to cut costs, not necessarily because they want better technology solutions for patients, but that's what all the care providers are thinking. So these bridges that make us, I think, feel so far apart from each other, that's what I'm trying to break down in SLPs, talk tech. Let's come together, get out of our silos, create a community where we are learning about things that work, and we're not just going to a bunch of sales calls, because sometimes I feel like my inbox, even from products that I trust and have worked with for a long time, it feels like the messaging is just not for me anymore. And I don't know, maybe that's gonna shift, I think a lot of people are using AI for marketing, so maybe that's part of the influence there, but things are gonna change a lot in the next year.

Talk about apps, people are building apps and deploying them the next day, building them on the backend of an AI model. And actually what's happening in that innovation space is amazing. We basically have a ton of people in the sandbox making all kinds of different things. And in some ways that's great, and in some ways I think that's just further muddying the waters. Yes. Because people are, they're kind of, we have some cart before the horse situation's happening. 

Mai Ling Chan 30:49 
Yes, and I love your skill set, your vocabulary, so I can hear a lot of the tech side coming in. You talked about data, and for our listener, and if you don't know it yet, I'm just going to reiterate, for the way that these programs are coded is by the information we give it, and that's what Leila's talking about. It only learns by what we tell it.

For example, we have some new apps that are coming out of software that says that it can have early detection for voice disorders or for neurological disorders. The issue that we're having is what's the data that's going in to code it so that it will then recognize these things later. There may be big gaps, areas that it's really missing, and so it could be very hurtful or harmful to people where they're being diagnosed when they shouldn't be, or they're being missed when they should be. There's so much space in between all the excitement and the sexiness of what's going on. I say the gap is the humanistic component, and so I present a lot, and I keep talking about having the human in the loop. Yes, you go to AI, you get the information where you tell it what you want, but then you are in the process of making sure that it's not giving you errors, clarifying, validating, using your clinical expertise. I mean, I could go on and on and probably need another 30 minutes, but we cannot lose that humanistic component in this new technology. 

Leila Denna Staiger 32:14 
Definitely. One of the things that came to my mind, actually, when I was building SLPs TAC-TAC is to make a community that was really for us, by us. And one thing that I have actually just kind of recently added to that is also with us, right? We need spaces where we can say like, these are the things we're experimenting with. And also here's the person who can actually lead us or advise us on the quality of the data sets, for example, that are used in training data for voice disorder detection technology. We want that, you know?

But we also want to know who are we supposed to be, who does have that expertise, right? So I don't know. I get so excited thinking about this space. There are so many new leadership opportunities. Like, we're going to have so many new leaders in the next five years. And I think, I don't know, maybe this is like the right time to get your PhD. You know what I mean? Because there's so much new research to be doing on some problems that we've been facing for a long time. 

Mai Ling Chan 33:25 
Fascinating. Well, you're definitely one of our forerunner leaders Layla. Thank you for everything you're doing How can we continue to follow you in your work? 

Leila Denna Staiger 33:32 
Well, obviously, check out the website, I guess, is where we start. It's slpstalktech.com. On the website, you can kind of learn about how to become a member of our community. Right now, we host live tech talks, which is where you and I have been interfacing. And we have a number of guests that cycle through innovators, researchers and clinicians talking about emergent tech and AI and clinical practice. We also have a resources page. So if you are interested in signing up for the newsletter, where I'm sending out kind of recaps of meetings, but also trying to send out information about news and new technology highlights, I actually am going to be starting my own podcast, which is like a thing.

Yeah, a thing that I was originally playing around, actually, with the AI-generated podcast that, you know, of course, were available through Notebook LM last winter and spring, but also on a few different sites as well. I thought it was great. You know, some people couldn't come to the meeting. So I was like, you know, just listen to the AI podcast of the transcript. I would kind of upload it. But there was so much editing that had to be done on the back end. And eventually, I was just kind of like editing one of our shows one night. And I realized I know how to do this, actually, because I used to work at a radio station like almost 20 years ago when I was an undergrad. I was the program director. I had like a live show. I made syndicated content. So I was just like, why don't I put my own voice on this and record some of these meetings or record more long-form conversations that we're not really able to capture during our small meetings? So the podcast is going to be coming out this fall. I'm so excited to share that. And so that's those are kind of the current projects of SLPs talk tech. And one other thing I just wanted to mention is I will see you at ASHA this year. I'm so excited. I'm also going to be giving a talk on about AI. It's called like advocacy to upskilling at AI focused PD and really looking at the kind of AI PD that's out there right now and some recommendations around developing a framework for speech language pathologists specifically that addresses the skills gaps that are kind of not necessarily being addressed in AI focused PD. So I'm excited for that as well. 

Mai Ling Chan 36:04 
Excellent excellent wonderful this has been a great conversation i hope that everyone's enjoyed it including are not so peace because i think i is the future for everyone and if you're interested i hope that you join these these new meetings and let us know that you heard about on the show that be great thanks so much layla. 

Leila Denna Staiger 36:21 
Thank you so much, Mei-Ling, and I'm so grateful for you giving me this opportunity and for everyone that's been coming along for this SLP's talk tech journey. It's really been so fun. 

Mai Ling Chan 36:33 
We hope you enjoyed this episode and invite you to leave us a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and share the show with people you think will find value from it.

This helps the show a lot, or have a great guest referral, reach out to us at xleaders at gmail.com. 

James Berges 36:49 
And if you want exclusive tips on becoming an exceptional leader, deliver straight to your inbox, just go to exceptionalleaders.com and sign up for our mailing list. Thanks for listening.