Introducing our fourth Founder Story featuring Matt Leete, Co-Founder of Spix App, which is a tool for gamers living with impaired speech to support social connection and rich interaction in-game!
Matt and his team have had a truly Remarkable (pardon-the-pun) journey. In 2020 the Spix team were one of three winners of our Design-athon challenge which led to their participation in our #RA21 accelerator program! We’ve loved being part of their journey and you can learn more about Matt’s story below…
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-b7n9SpWgE[/embedyt]
A time-coded transcript of this video is available for download and the script is also available below.
Matt Leete [00:00:02]
The ability to share your story with people and to share your emotion with people, I think is fundamental to living.
I’m Matt Leete, founder of Spix App, a tool for gamers with impaired speech to support social connection and reach interaction in game.
I’ve always been interested in building stuff. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. To that end, I went off to study engineering and then design. In engineering,I found is very technology focused and design was very people focused.
And my work in the end has been kind of looking at the intersection of those two disciplines. How do we use new technology to solve real people’s problems?
In 2020 I entered the Remarkable design-a-thon where I met the rest of my team at Spix.
We formed a team with a shared passion for online gaming and we looked to solve how we could make online gaming more inclusive.
The main way people communicate with each other in gaming is through speech. My personal favorite experiences all involve being able to communicate and express yourself and being able to, you know, cheer on your teammates and being able to lead a team through a battle or whatever it happens to be.
The tools that exist currently or the most popular tools currently do revolve around speech.
For people with impaired speech, gaming is often more difficult. When we set out to design Spix, we wanted to design a product that, from the ground up, was built around inclusivity.
We wanted to build a platform that everyone had an equal chance to contribute and an equal chance to be heard. So far we’ve built a prototype. We’re currently testing it with a range of users with specific needs. We’re looking to finalize our prototype and make ready for market.
So I have a connection with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance. My great grandmother actually worked here, so she actually worked with people with cerebral palsy on improving their speech. And here I am 50 years later, trying to support people in the same field.
As part of the Remarkable program we get an incredible amount of support. We have coaches and mentors that we see multiple times a week. They’re always bouncing solutions right back in just an incredibly positive and supportive way. And that’s really motivating because you really have a drive to, to solve these problems and impact people’s lives.
[00:02:28]
Meet Matt and his team at our online Demo Day on Tuesday the 13th of July! Registrations are essential.
