Richard Cave

Richard is Co-Director for the Centre for digital Language Inclusion (CDLI), a program of the Global Disability Innovation hub at UCL. CDLI is creating speech recognition models in ten African languages to help people with different speech to be better understood - for example people with Cerebral Palsy, Stroke, MND/ALS, Cleft Palate, Deaf speech and many other conditions.

Richard is a speech and language therapist with 17 years clinical experience working with people living with ALS/MND and Head and Neck Cancer. He is a national advisor to Royal College of Speech and Language Therapist in the UK and recent recipient of the Allied Professional award from the International Alliance of ALS/Motor Neurone Disease.

Between 2019-2024 Richard provided consultancy to Google Research on the Euphonia and Project Relate research on speech recognition technology for those with ‘non-standard’ speech.

His PhD focused on the lived experience of people living with speech change when using AI-driven speech recognition technology and how it helped them to be better understood in everyday conversation.