AI Agents, CSD Resources Hub, and Animated Augmented Input

Welcome to SLPs Talk Tech, where speech-language pathologists and allied professionals get updates, insights, and practical strategies on how AI and emerging technologies are shaping research, clinical practice, and support for individuals with communication disorders. We spotlight innovations, AI tools, and strategies that address real challenges faced by SLPs and their colleagues.

Let’s begin

In the News: AI Agents and Surveillance

What do AI agents having their own social media platform mean for speech-language pathology? Well, to be honest, I’m not gonna answer this question in this newsletter. But I do feel like this question dominates my thoughts about AI, agents, and the work clinicians do for their clients every day. Agentic AI, which consists of systems capable of independently executing tasks, seems quite removed from current clinical practice. Professional development about AI Agents for clinicians is lacking, but “AI agents” are what dominates technology news headlines. As of February 8, 2026, Moltbook, a reddit-like social media platform for AI agents, grew to 1.6M “users”. It’s essential to center the fact that bots on the Moltbook platform are created with human prompts and bias, and once they are deployed they act independently and can only be controlled indirectly (e.g., pausing or shutting down). It’s hard to ignore the shift toward figuring out how to leverage AI agents to offload (reasonable) work tasks, while simultaneously trying to keep yourself safe from them.

• More about Moltbook at this story by NPR’s All Things Considered

How Clinicians Can Bridge the AI Literacy Gap?

Establish Your Foundational AI and Gen AI Literacy

If we want to navigate this new era, we have to equip SLPs for ethical AI use. A major theme continues to be the need for a practical understanding of fundamental AI concepts. This isn’t just about learning how to prompt; it’s about understanding the ecosystem. I recently caught a story on Boston’s On Point Radio about the AI surveillance state, and found it to be an important: if we don’t understand how these tools handle data, we can’t truly protect ourselves or our clients interests.

🔍 Check out the Inside the AI Surveillance State story on On Point Radio to see the bigger picture about video data in our communities.

Have you seen that the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CAPCSD) launched an AI Resources Hub? The CAPCSD AI Task Force has developed a comprehensive resource offering information and guidance on the role of AI in education, clinical training, and professional development. I would encourage you to explore this resource for valuable information into general-purpose AI tools, particularly concerning the integration of generative AI within communication sciences and disorders. It provides practical tools, discusses ethical considerations, and suggests strategies for effectively integrating AI into teaching, research, and clinical supervision.

Actionable Advice:

1. If you are a clinician, practice auditing your “AI Curiosity.” This week, instead of looking for a new tool, spend 10 minutes looking into the “why” behind one you already use. Know their privacy policy or a technical breakdown of how it handles your data. Understanding the “Surveillance State” side of tech helps you set better boundaries for you and your client’s data.

2. If you use ChatGPT, there are differences between their Free, Plus, and Pro accounts. If you want to learn more about privacy risks when interacting with chatbots, a recent study at Stanford exposed the risks associated with these conversations, particularly for children.

3. Move intentionally - Clients, families, children, and care providers are likely using generative AI. We have to move intentionally towards understanding the technology not just for ourselves, but so we can connect better with the people we’re here to help. Ask others about how they are exploring AI (e.g., text, video, images) or successful use cases, creating spaces for judgement free dialog.

4. For school-based professionals, AI guidance is significantly lagging behind AI use among students, educators, and administrators. RAND research recently published findings from survey data about AI use in schools. One key finding that stood out to me was “Over 80 percent of students reported that teachers did not explicitly teach them how to use AI for schoolwork”. How many teachers, or speech-language pathologists for our sake, have been explicitly taught how to use AI as professionals? Read about this and other findings by clicking here.

Tech Tool Highlight

Animated Images as Augmented Input: From Static to Dynamic Scene Cues

Our focus this month is on clinical technology that offers practical utility. I’ve been particularly impressed by the advancements in AI-generated imagery, specifically Google’s Veo 3.1. This new tool elevates the technology by enabling users to animate a static image using a simple text prompt.

For clinicians using augmented input with Augmentative and Alternative Communication users, this capability could be leveraged for creating scene cues. As Anna A. Allen, PhD, CCC-SLP, noted in her 2022 article in Autism Spectrum News, scene cues can help individuals who have difficulty following directions. Scene cue (SC) are “either a photograph (static SC) or a short video clip (dynamic SC) which a mentor shows to a learner on a mobile device, smartwatch (O’Brien et al., 2020), or in paper form at the moment it is needed.” Scene cues, described as an “alternative support,” are applied to “visually represent language input in a more concrete way (Shane & Weiss-Kapp, 2008)” to address a learner’s “interpretive challenges” (Allan, 2022). This new animation technology could be a powerful way to generate the dynamic scene cues described.

Check out Google's Veo 3.1 on the SLPsTalkTech Resources Hub

I tested this out with my own logo, which wasn’t so bad.

To animate a video to demonstrate “a car GO-ing,” I tried this:

• Prompt: “make a car go from being still to going, it should be a minimal image, with limited distractions. focus on the action “go” .”

• Refined Prompt: “make a simple toy car go from being still to driving on a road from a side view, it should be a a video with a white background and no other visual details. when the car starts driving we should hear the word “go”."

Overall, I’m happy with the result. Given the amount of time and work, this was a strategy I could use today and in the future to add “AI Tech” to my clinical practice. After I made this video, I uploaded it to a simple 3x3 grid display in GoTalk Now and was able to use this dynamic scene cue to facilitate attention to AAC and provide an additional visual representation of the concept GO during car play. If you incorporate this into your own clinical work, please share your experience! I would gladly contribute to a shared video library of dynamic scene cues that others find beneficial for those who benefit from augmented input.

📢 Share This Newsletter!

SLPs Talk Tech is free to read and share. If you find value in this work and want to help sustain it, contributions are always appreciated but never required.

Thank you for being part of this virtual space where we think critically, stay curious, and keep humans at the center of technologies that help us communicate.