Build
Apps, tools, prototypes, and experiments designed to solve practical problems.
A public laboratory
Open
Independence
Building technology that expands independence.
Open Independence explores how technology, media, accessibility, and thoughtful design can give people more choices — and help them live life on their own terms.
Our definition
Independence is the freedom to live the life you choose, to the fullest extent possible, on your own terms.
It does not require doing everything alone. It means having meaningful choices, useful tools, appropriate support, and the autonomy to decide what works for you.
What we do
Four ways in
Everything here fits somewhere in this shape. Some pieces move between categories over time.
Learn
Accessibility insights, technology reviews, independent-living ideas, and lessons from the development process.
Live
Practical discussions about autonomy, support, employment, communication, daily life, and personal choice.
Imagine
New possibilities for AI, assistive technology, media, interfaces, and the future of independent living.
Featured apps
Real tools, built to expand independence.
Three shipping apps from the Open Independence lab. Each one explores a different way technology can hand more choice back to the person using it.
- Artificial IntelligenceReleased
AiVi — See & Speak
An AI visual interpreter that discusses what your camera sees in real time. Point your camera at anything and have a live, voice-driven conversation about it, with customizable AI agents, spatial audio voice commands, and task-specific focus modes. Also available as a downloadable Mac app.
Open live app - CommunicationReleased
Kaidence — Speak Genius
An AI-powered augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app that predicts and speaks text. It learns user patterns to predict what someone wants to say, with a text-only mode and a picture mode that pairs images with words to support diverse communication styles.
Open live app - EducationReleased
TypeRight — Type Together
A gamified educational app that teaches typing skills to users of all abilities, using audio and video to create an engaging, accessible learning experience for diverse learners.
Open live app
Latest from Open Independence
Recent signals
- Project update
SceneCast — release
SceneCast transcribes audio or video into readable, downloadable text. Alongside the speech it identifies who is speaking, tags sound effects and music, and marks scene changes, so the transcript reflects what happened rather than only what was said.
- Project update
ASL Speaker — release
ASL Speaker translates American Sign Language gestures into spoken words in real time, using computer vision and machine learning to recognize signs and vocalize their meaning.
- Project update
Access Atlas — release
Access Atlas is an accessible map for discovering and sharing accessibility information about real places. It combines AI-generated insights with crowdsourced contributions so people can understand a location's mobility, sensory, restroom, and parking accessibility before they go, and add what they learn back to the shared record.
- Project update
Awareness Engine — release
Awareness Engine increases situational awareness by detecting and summarizing important events in your environment. It can be configured to recognize speech, environmental sounds, and more, with notifications available on Apple Watch.
- Project update
NORA — release
NORA records short audio snippets triggered by keywords to support memory recall. It listens for specific cue words and automatically captures a brief recording, helping people remember appointments, names, places, and other details from their day, then prompts follow-up questions to log the relevant information.
- Project update
Echo Pal — release
Echo Pal listens through the microphone and speaks back everything it hears using text-to-speech.
Share an idea
What makes independence harder than it should be?
The Ideas board is where new app ideas live — mine, and ones sent in by visitors. Some become real projects.
Browse the board, or add an idea of your own.
Follow the Experiment
Occasional signals from the lab.
Receive occasional project releases, new ideas, and lessons from the Open Independence lab. No frequent sends, no tracking pixels.
Technology should adapt to people — not require people to adapt to it.