By Roberta Burkhart, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feb. 1—On a quiet, cold day inside his Mount Washington home, David Betts sits in his living room, framed by sweeping views of Downtown Pittsburgh.
The walls and shelves hold evidence of a life spent pushing limits — Ironman race medals, cycling gear, professional accolades and more — yet Betts steers the conversation away from himself. Instead, he tells story after story about the people who have inspired him.
This is an instinct that has only deepened since his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — a progressive neurodegenerative disease with no cure.
Betts jokes easily, carrying himself like someone long accustomed to hard goals and harder work.
“Yeah, I’ve been known to be a little relentless.”
good AI
Relentless is one way to put it.
Before ALS entered his life, Betts was a senior leader at Deloitte, a healthcare consultant and an endurance athlete who competed Ironman triathlons and a seven-day stage race through the Alps — “the hardest amateur cycling event in the world.”
After nearly 22 years with Deloitte, he retired in January. At his retirement party, colleagues presented him with a bicycle covered in name tags, each person choosing a part — from training wheels to handlebar and pedals — that represented how they saw him.
“The ones that make me the happiest are the training wheels,” he admitted, tears springing to his eyes.
Now 56, Betts is facing a different kind of challenge.
He is living with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal disease affecting the body’s nerve cells. ALS eventually causes nerve cells to cease functioning and die, ultimately leading to extreme muscle weakness, paralysis and death, according to the CDC.
Both the causes of ALS and the exact number of those who have the disease are mostly unknown. The CDC suggests about 30,000 Americans are living with the disease and an additional 5,000 are diagnosed annually.
Instead of retreating inward, Betts has spent the past year building outward, creating an AI-powered communication app designed to help people with ALS continue speaking in their own voice, tone and intent — even after their natural voice begins to fade.
Betts named the app — Talk To Me, Goose — as a nod to the 1980s film “Top Gun” and a phrase that the character Maverick (Tom Cruise) utters during the final dogfight scene when he’s grasping for focus, guidance and courage. Maverick repeats the emotional line in the sequel, released in 2022.
‘I knew something was wrong’
Long before his ALS diagnosis, Betts sensed that something in his body had changed.
Tiny signs emerged — twitches, cramps, fatigue, changes in his speech. Despite his fitness, something was off and not everyone took him seriously. Many doctors “weren’t listening to me about what I was experiencing.”
After months of searching for answers, Betts received his diagnosis in December 2024 at the Sean M. Healey and AMG Center for ALS in Boston. The verdict: sporadic ALS, with no known genetic cause.
ALS is terminal. Most patients survive less than five years. Betts heard that prognosis — and promptly chose not to dwell on it.
“They told me most people get two to five years. Go get your affairs in order. That kind of thing, I don’t listen to.”
Fear is unavoidable, he says, but inaction is a choice.
“Yes, I’m terrified. I know what’s going to happen. I can’t let that consume me. Otherwise I wouldn’t move. I’d be paralyzed without being paralyzed.”
The symptom that scared Betts most wasn’t losing mobility — it was speech.
His ability to communicate had led him from bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater arts to an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University to a principal role within Deloitte, where he was a highly sought-after problem solver in the life sciences and health care industries.
Betts knew what awaited him if he did nothing.
“All I could think about was the Speak & Spell-like voice that Stephen Hawking had.”
He found that unacceptable — not just personally but also philosophically. “It’s 2024. There must be something better,” he kept telling himself.
Betts saw a deeper failure in how assistive communication has been handled for decades. “We ask people to settle for far less than what’s possible, and we’ve been doing it for far too long.”
So he did what he’s always done when confronted with a hard problem.
“I’m a problem solver,” he said. “That’s my job. I solve problems.”
Building a voice from scratch
Despite having no background in app development, Betts decided to build the solution himself.
“I can wait, or I can figure it out. What do I have to lose?”
Betts enrolled in online coding courses. He got frustrated. He got bored. He leaned heavily on artificial intelligence tools, not to replace thinking but to accelerate it.
“I used it very much like a teammate,” he said.
Within weeks, he had a working prototype. Within months, a full app.
“I didn’t know how long I’d have my voice. I still don’t.”
Using voice-cloning technology from ElevenLabs — an advanced AI voice technology company founded in 2022 — Betts discovered something startling.
“It took me, like, 30 15-second clips to make my first voice clone.”
When he played it back, the result stopped him cold. “This sounds like me,” he realized, stunned.
The technology already existed, but no one had put it together yet in a way that honored identity, emotion and timing.
“If we can make a deep fake of Tom Cruise,” then the potential to use that same power for good is already there, Betts said.
Closing the ‘awkward pause’
One of Betts’ central missions for the app is solving what he calls “the awkward pause” — the silence that creeps in when someone types too slowly to be part of a conversation.
That lag causes others to psychologically disengage, he explained, because it takes too long to type what you want to say.
The pause is where isolation creeps in and where connection fails. Typing speeds for many assistive devices average six words per minute — far too slow, in Betts’ opinion.
His app predicts intent, mood and tone — allowing users to speak faster, more naturally and with emotional range.
The emotional heart of the project arrived via a Montana family that Betts connected with through their shared ALS journey. The father, who died Jan. 26, was in the advanced stages of the disease and had not been able to speak for some time.
Using his cloned voice and Betts’ app, he was able to tell his three children a bedtime story — something his youngest had never heard him do before.
Hearing about that connection between the father and his children touched Betts’ heart. He remembers telling his wife, Anne Mundell, “I don’t care if anyone ever uses the app again. Mission accomplished.”
Expanding outward
In April, Betts introduced himself to the ALS community on Facebook. A message arrived from Wendy Faust, executive director of the Live Like Lou Foundation, a national nonprofit organization established in 2017 to assist ALS patients.
Named for MLB Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig, it focuses on “leaving ALS better than we found it” through grants, volunteer support and research initiatives.
What followed was a cascade of coincidences with Faust: shared hometowns in Southern California, mutual friends, Pittsburgh ties and even a Deloitte connection through a Live Like Lou board member whose daughter previously had worked on Betts’ team.
“It was crazy,” he said, laughing.
Today, Talk To Me, Goose is available for free to people living with ALS in the U.S. and Canada through Live Like Lou. The app works in 31 languages, across Apple, Android and Windows platforms — including a Windows beta version that Betts released on Christmas Day.
“It was my Christmas gift to myself.”
He spent that holiday debugging voice speed settings for a woman who needed it immediately.
Globally, Betts sees a much larger horizon: “There’s 97 million people globally who would benefit from assistive technology.”
He is scheduled to speak this month at the United Nations Office in Vienna after being selected as a Zero Project Awardee and speaker for his work on the app. The Zero Project, founded in 2008, is a global initiative dedicated to creating a world with zero barriers for people with disabilities. It identifies, researches and shares innovative scalable solutions, particularly focusing on themes like employment.
Talk to Me, Goose will be recognized with a Zero Project Award, “reflecting its strong endorsement by the global disability innovation community,” Wilfried Kainz, Zero Project’s head of research, said in an email.
Image DescriptionDavid Betts created Talk to Me, Goose, an AI-powered text-to-speech app that allows people with ALS and other disabilities to speak with their own voice. (Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette)
The app was selected by more than 400 experts from 586 nominations across 93 countries.
“David Betts’ application exemplifies how innovators can harness the power of assistive technology for rapid development and deployment at scale,” Kainz said. “It is particularly noteworthy for its highly innovative use of AI to bring rich, human texture into generated speech, setting a compelling benchmark for inclusive voice technology.”
A lasting legacy
To help sustain the free ALS app, Betts created a companion storytelling platform called Fables Adventures — a for-profit story-generating app.
Betts and his wife together founded Mundell Designs as the umbrella for the technology he is tinkering with in retirement. The small, mission-driven company is the home of Talk To Me, Goose and Fables Adventures. The couple has personally invested in the company, allowing Betts to focus less on profit and more on access, advocacy and scale.
Fables arose as a way “to support my habit of wanting to give things away,” he says, laughing.
Subscriptions, audio stories and community-created content help fund free access to Talk To Me, Goose for people with ALS in the U.S. and Canada through the Live Like Lou Foundation — a model Betts hopes will allow the company to sustain both creativity and care.
The effort has already raised more than $81,000 for Live Like Lou, with a goal of $250,000 this year.
He’s also become an advocate for federal ALS policy, pushing for reauthorization of the ACT for ALS legislation before it expires in 2026.
“Without that, I think we’re just going to slow down finding a cure.”
Ever onward
Betts still rides his bike. Still climbs stairs. Still measures progress — without obsessing.
“I don’t like to measure, but I take inventory.”
He can no longer climb hills near his house, but he can still ride his bicycle by the river.
“I say, ‘Not yet.’ I say ‘Not yet’ a lot.”
He recently committed to riding 50 miles for Faust’s 50th birthday: “I’ve got 41 more to go.”
Relentless, indeed.
People often ask if he’s angry.
“I don’t have time to be angry. I don’t have the energy to be angry. I choose joy.”
He points to a book by Hanna Du Plessis, “Bedsores and Bliss: Finding Fullness of Life with a Terminal Diagnosis” (Okay Then, $18.57), and a concept that he gleaned from her words and that guides him now: “Grieve with abandon all that is lost and then pause and reflect on everything that is still possible.”
Betts has done both. In the process, he has given thousands of people something many thought they would lose forever: their own voice.
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