All-Voiced: a digital platform to transform clinical voice assessment on a global scale

Any given voice can say a lot, but voice assessments are not always easy. In the field of speech therapy, assessing voice alterations accurately continues to be a challenge. Neus Calaf, a course instructor on the Bachelor's Degree in Speech and Language Therapy at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC), has created All-Voiced, a digital platform designed to offer innovative solutions to global clinical challenges. It combines knowledge and technology to improve vocal assessment processes, facilitate the training of professionals and actively contribute to research in vocal health. The project received the audience prize and the Ramon Molinas Foundation award for social impact in SpinUOC 2025, the UOC's entrepreneurship programme.

Neus Calaf presenting All-Voiced at SpinUOC last June 26

The idea for All-Voiced came from Calaf's clinical experience. She often encountered a persistent problem: auditory-perceptual assessments of the voice – how it sounds and to what extent it is altered – were too subjective. As a result, there was often little consensus among professionals. "Despite having assessment scales, I found there was a lack of clear benchmarks, and this made me feel very insecure as a professional," she said.

The problem also arose in the classroom and in research. "CAPE-V", an instrument that standardizes assessment of the voice in speech therapy, constituted a great advance on previous scales, but we still didn't have benchmarks that would help calibrate the clinicians' ear," she said. "In an attempt to address this shortcoming, I looked for platforms to do perceptual experiments, but none of them provided what I needed," she recalled. It was then that she decided to create one herself: she learned programming from scratch, built the first prototype... and just kept going from there.

A versatile tool for practice and knowledge

Currently, All-Voiced is a website application that allows the user to make standardized voice assessments. It also offers training exercises with immediate feedback (both individually and in group sessions for students), resources for teaching and research, and even educational games. It is also being used to build a collaborative database of anonymized user assessments from around the world. The first results of this project received the Voice Foundation Hamdan Award.

The project was set up as a tool to improve the perceptual assessment of the voice, and this continues to be one of its strengths. However, it is in the midst of a transition towards a broader and more comprehensive concept of voice assessment, which will incorporate other clinical and technological dimensions, including artificial intelligence. This development is intended to expand the platform's impact both in the field of care and in research and training.

All-Voiced is designed to meet a range of needs: it digitalizes and standardizes voice assessment, and is evolving towards an integrated ecosystem that allows the process to be further simplified, bringing together different clinical tools in a single platform. It also incorporates shared perceptual references, promoting more evidence-based clinical practice. It also fills gaps in university education with practical, interactive resources, offering tools for the design and execution of experiments in research and fostering a global community that shares knowledge and scientific consensus. All this is presented in an intuitive, accessible interface that can be adapted to different languages and professional contexts. Catalan is one of the languages available, the result of the research that Calaf carried out in her doctoral thesis, which focused on the bilingual (Catalan/Spanish) adaptation and validation of the CAPE-V protocol. This work has contributed to putting Catalan on the international map of speech therapy research and practice.

Global growth and future strategy

All-Voiced now has more than 600 users in 30 different countries, mainly in the United States, Spain and Canada. It is used by speech therapists, teachers, researchers and students of speech therapy, both for training and in research and clinical practice. Currently, the platform uses a freemium model: all available resources are free, but the first premium services, aimed at professionals who want to optimize their clinical use of the platform, are already being developed.

On this basis, the project is moving into a new stage of growth, which will include rolling out advanced functionalities and opening the platform to institutions, with collective licences for universities, hospitals, clinics and voice laboratories. To make this possible, Calaf is looking for funding that will allow the project to grow and ensure the technology and organization develop sustainably.

Creating to transform: the driving force behind All-Voiced

All-Voiced was based on academic knowledge, but also came from a vital need to create. "For me, programming has been like discovering a magic power: suddenly, I could do everything I had imagined to help speech therapists and patients," Calaf said. The project, which began as a personal tool, has become an initiative with international impact and a transformative mission. "SpinUOC has been key in providing structure and focus for this growth. It has made me realize that this is not just an idea: it is a project with a life of its own, with great potential for transformation," concluded the creator of All-Voiced, who continues to work to make her platform contribute to more precise, open and connected speech therapy.

This research project supports the UN's Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 3, Good Health and Well-being; SDG 4, Quality Education; SDG 5, Gender Equality, SDG 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; and SDG 10, Reduced Inequalities.

Research at the UOC

Specializing in the digital realm, the UOC's research contributes to the construction of future society and the transformations required to tackle global challenges.

Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups make up five research units, each with a mission: Culture for a critical society, Lifelong education, Digital health and planetary well-being, Ethical and human-centred technology and Digital transition and sustainability.

The university's Hubbik platform fosters the development of UOC community knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship initiatives.

The goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and open knowledge are strategic pillars that underpin the UOC's teaching, research and knowledge transfer activities. For more information, visit research.uoc.edu.