Northeastern Student Builds ExpressAI to Give Nonverbal Users Emotional Voice

An app aimed at flatter, monotone voices

ExpressAI is still early in development, according to Northeastern Global News. Its purpose is to replace the more monotone text-to-voice systems that currently dominate the market, Chaudhry said.

She gave an example of how it would work. If a user wants to express love to a mother or father, they can type out the message. The app, understanding the context, will read the text back with the proper emotion and tone, Chaudhry said.

The technology relies on sentiment analysis, the process of an AI model analyzing volumes of text to detect positive or negative attributes. According to IBM, as cited in the article, many companies also use it in customer service to route calls to the right departments and to flag when customers are happy or frustrated.

"This is a space that hasn't been innovated in awhile," Chaudhry said. She described being able to communicate through voice effectively and naturally as a "privilege everyone should have."

From a nonprofit to a computer science degree

Chaudhry is a third-year computer science student and the president of DesiHeart, a nonprofit she launched in 2020 while a freshman in high school. The organization offers virtual drama workshops, summer programs and coding classes for neurodiverse students, including those on the autism spectrum or with other developmental and learning conditions. Its mission is to help them improve speaking and motor skills and reach development goals.

She said the idea grew from seeing special education students kept apart from their classmates in middle and high school, in a separate classroom and even a separate playground. She did not think that was right.

She started at Northeastern as a biology major planning to practice medicine, but felt early on that she could have more influence in tech. Working with students over video conferencing and other tools at her nonprofit showed her how limiting some of their communication devices were. "It became clear that I needed to have a computer science degree to really develop something for them," she said.

Funding, an award and lab experience

Chaudhry has received federal funding to help get the app up and running. She also received additional funding from Northeastern after taking first place in the AI and technology category of the Women Who Empower Initiative, a university-wide program that celebrates and empowers women in the Northeastern community.

She said the win has helped her credibility and will help her fundraise. "The award is helping us take ExpressAI from the design stage toward development and further our mission of making technology more accessible," she said.

She also works as an undergraduate assistant in Northeastern's Technology Equity and Accessibility Lab, which develops technologies to support people with disabilities. The lab is directed by Maitraye Das, a professor with appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Department of Art and Design. Over the past semester, Chaudhry helped develop prototype devices for children with cerebral visual impairment, a brain disorder that prevents children from clearly seeing and interpreting images. She also helped recruit families to take part in the lab's evaluations of the technology.

Das praised her initiative. "She understands the challenges of this kind of community-centric work but still took on those challenges head on," she said.

What it means

ExpressAI has not yet reached the development stage, so no release details or performance results are available. If it works as described, it would give nonverbal users a way to convey tone and feeling, not just words, through synthesized speech. For now, funding and the award move the project from design toward building.