Whisper - talk without voice

Whisper is a communication aid for the non-verbal community. It allows someone who doesn't speak to participate in a conversation with others who do. The non-verbal participant (called the Whisperer) uses their device to type their part of the conversation: the letters they type appear instantly on the devices used by the verbal participants (called Listeners). Listeners speak their responses to the Whisperer and to each other.

Conversations assisted by Whisper are real-time, spoken conversations where all the participants can hear each other. In the same way that verbal participants are careful not to speak when someone else has begun speaking, they are careful not to speak when the Whisperer has started typing. This allows normal turn-taking in the conversation, even when the Whisperer types slowly, because the first letter the Whisperer types appears immediately on Listener screens.

Whisper works well both for in-person conversations and for remote conversations over an audio/video call. For conversations where the Whisperer and the Listeners are in person, no cellular data or wifi connection is required. For remote conversations, a cellular data or wifi connection is required. Listeners without Apple devices or who don't have the app can use a web browser to listen via cellular data or wifi.

Each Whisper-assisted conversation has an associated URL that the Whisperer can send to Listeners to invite them to join. Whisperers can create different conversations for different situations; for example, they may use a separate conversation for each recurring conference call they participate in. Listener devices remember prior conversations, so sending a URL is only needed the first time a Listener wants to join a particular conversation. After that the Listener can rejoin simply by selecting the conversation on their device.

Whisper facilitates spoken conversations between users who know each other, and who have other means of communication (messaging, email, etc.) by which a Whisperer can send a conversation URL to a Listener. As with other spoken conversations, a Listener who joins a Whisper-assisted conversation has no access to what the Whisperer may have typed before they joined. Whispered content cannot be copied by Listeners, and when the Whisperer leaves a conversation everything they "said" is immediately erased from all Listener devices.

Whisper takes the privacy of its users very seriously. The app keeps no personally identifiable information about any user, and the memory of which conversations a Whisperer has created or a Listener has participated in is kept in app-secure storage on their device. (For users with more than one device, Whisper allows this "conversational profile" to be securely shared among their devices.)

Whisper is a free, open-source app, provided as a service to the non-verbal community. It is being made available everywhere because there are non-verbal people everywhere. Whisper is currently localized only in US English. If it proves popular in non-English geographies, the hope is to localize it via user community efforts.

More information may be found at https://clickonetwo.github.io/whisper. The source code is at https://github.com/clickonetwo/whisper.