Who is Gordon Harris?
Gordon Harris
Gordon has spent 35 years building tools that help people speak when their own voice can't. Over that time the hardware has changed many times: desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, a watch, and now AI. The goal has stayed the same: get the right words to the person, quickly, at a price families can manage.
From a talking robot to GusAI.
The Gus Robot
Gordon designed the Gus Robot to test whether a computer could recognize spoken words and answer with a voice of its own. It appeared at trade shows across the United States and Canada and in a family film. At one show in Vancouver, someone who worked with speech disorders asked whether the same technology could help people with autism, stroke and Parkinson's. That question set the direction for everything that followed.
And the name? G-U-S stood for "Gord's Ultimate Salesman."
Gus! Multimedia Speech System for Windows
Introduced on October 13, 1993 at the Closing the Gap assistive technology conference in Minneapolis. It ran on low-cost Windows computers at a time when speech devices were usually dedicated, proprietary machines with medical-equipment prices, and it helped start the move toward everyday hardware.
Gus! Pocket Communicator
As computers got smaller, the software followed. The Gus! Pocket Communicator turned an HP iPAQ Pocket PC handheld into a speech device, and the same software ran on Windows tablet computers. Speech help was no longer tied to a desk.
TalkTablet PRO
An AAC speech app for iPhone and iPad, later for Android, Windows and Chromebook. It became the fourth highest-grossing education app in the United States, and it is still used every day by families, schools and speech-language pathologists. Gus Speech Tablets pair the app with rugged, ready-to-use hardware.
SpeechWatch PRO
A self-contained wearable AAC device: a speech device, phone and smartwatch in one, with messaging, GPS, email and apps, for people who need their words with them all day.
GusAI
An AI speech app for iPhone and iPad. GusAI listens to the person you're talking with, knows who you're with, where you are and the time of day, and offers phrases you tap once to speak. The traditional TalkTablet grid is built in and stays in sync.
Three things 35 years made clear.
Conversations move fast. When building a sentence one button at a time takes too long, the moment passes and people stop waiting.
Each move, from dedicated machines to PCs, handhelds, tablets and phones, made speech tools cheaper and easier to carry. GusAI runs on the iPhone and iPad people already own.
Grids put thousands of words on screen and leave the searching to the user. GusAI uses the moment itself (who, where, when and what was just said) to bring the likely words forward.
Thirty-five years on, the work continues.
Gus Communication Devices is still based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and still focused on one thing: helping people who know what they want to say, say it.
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