The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2020–2021
Tallk turns a Samsung tablet's camera into an eye-typed voice for ALS patients
Free app repurposes the camera already inside a €200 Samsung tablet as eye tracking, so ALS patients can type and speak through a predictive keyboard
Samsung Electronics · Cheil Spain
What it had to solve
ALS leaves people completely immobile and silent, and the specialist technologies that help them communicate again cost around €6,000 — beyond reach for about 90% of patients. Samsung tablets cost under €200 and already carry cameras with the eye-recognition and tracking technology normally used for facial recognition.
How it works
ALS is a disease that leaves people completely immobile and silent, and technologies that help them communicate again do exist — but their cost puts them out of reach for about 90% of patients. In Spain, where average income is around €23,000 a year, the most popular eye-communication systems cost roughly €6,000.
Samsung and Cheil Spain spotted the expensive function hiding inside hardware people already owned: the cameras in Samsung tablets include eye-recognition and tracking technology normally used for facial recognition. TALLK, a free app developed with eye-tracking specialist Irisbond, uses that camera to locate the user's pupils and other characteristic points of the face, then translates eye movements into typing on a predictive virtual keyboard that speaks each phrase aloud.
Because TALLK is software on an ordinary tablet rather than a dedicated medical device, it turned a €200 consumer product into the kind of communication aid that previously cost thousands. Within three months the team reported that half of Spain's ALS patients had used the app, and D&AD later carried the project in its awards archive.
Why it lands
- The insight was economic: the assistive function already existed inside cheap mass-market hardware, so the fix could be software alone.
- It started from the user's remaining ability — eye movement — and built the whole interface around that single channel.
- A predictive keyboard and phrase bank compensated for the camera being less precise than dedicated infrared eye trackers.
- A free app removed the purchase decision entirely, which matters for families already carrying the high cost of the disease.
What it did
Within three months of launch the team reported that half of Spain's ALS patients had used the app; the launch film drew three million views and the campaign reached 62 million people, with a PR value above €1 million. D&AD later carried TALLK in its awards archive.
What you can take
When the barrier is price, find the expensive function hiding inside a cheap product: hardware already in millions of hands can become assistive technology with software alone
Since then
TALLK launched free on the Galaxy Store and Google Play for around ten Samsung tablet models, in Spanish, with its developers saying more languages and international markets were next. Its lasting point is structural: assistive technology should be sought inside products people already own, not only in specialist medical equipment.
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