Shay Cohen joined the board of the Bender JCC of Greater Washington at his wife’s bidding.
“I do what my wife tells me,” he joked.
But it’s also a way to give back to the community that’s provided so much for Cohen and his family the past five years.
The Potomac resident’s son, Matan, has attended Lessans Camp JCC — an inclusive camp for children with and without disabilities — for three summers and was featured in the Bender JCC’s Dinner of Champions in 2024.
“Saying we love the JCC camp is an understatement,” Cohen said. “JCC inclusivity is so admirable.”
Matan, Cohen’s middle child, is minimally speaking. Though he doesn’t express himself verbally, it’s obvious to Cohen that his son loves camp when the 8-year-old sprints from the car to greet his camp counselor in the morning.
“It’s hard to describe for a family with a kid with special needs how good [Lessans Camp JCC’s inclusivity] is. It was important for me to sustain this,” Cohen said. “Their approach to inclusivity is so unique and so rare that to my wife and me, it’s important to keep it alive and flourish.”
Cohen is a member of the Bender JCC board as of July 2. He also joined the JCC’s inclusion committee.
“I want to give back, and I’m there as their resource,” he said. “Whatever they need, I’m there to help.”
Cohen’s desire to help his son thrive is the driving force behind what he does professionally, too. He is the co-founder and CEO of Verbali, an AI-powered assistive technology company that builds communication tools for nonspeaking and minimally-speaking children.
Having studied electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University and worked in the field afterwards, Cohen said he’d never considered founding a startup company.
“I’m in my 40s; it’s not something that I’m chasing now,” Cohen said.
But Matan relies on Augmentative and Alternative Communication devices to communicate, a technology that Cohen described as so primitive that it’s “backwards.”
“The last innovation that happened in the [AAC] space happened 16 years ago, when the iPad was first introduced,” Cohen said. “Since then, nothing has really changed.”
AAC systems come in low-tech, mid-tech and high-tech, the latter of which Cohen develops. High-tech AAC can look like a tablet that acts as a keyboard with images in place of letters. Matan needs these images since he is not yet literate.
The user is expected to find and point to the images that correspond to the words they want to use, then build a sentence.
“It sounds very straightforward,” Cohen said. “It’s great if you want to say, ‘I want to eat a banana.’ But once you want to answer a little bit more complex question — for example, ‘What did you do at school today?’ — this is where it becomes a little bit challenging.”
The AAC device can only suggest the words that a caregiver or speech therapist pre-programs, a process that Cohen said can take hours.
“It’s very frustrating for parents because they cannot predict the type of vocabulary or type of conversation the kid will have, especially at school,” he said. “I don’t know what type of conversation they have [in school], so it’s hard for me to prepare that AAC for my son. Putting aside the amount of effort, it’s just impossible to predict.”
Verbali uses artificial intelligence to offer the relevant word suggestions to the child based on the conversation. In doing so, Verbali aims to make communication “more natural and accessible than ever before,” according to the website.
Cohen’s success story came as he read an “Elephant & Piggie” book to Matan and asked the rising second grader a comprehension question afterwards. Verbali generated a picture of a pig and an elephant, and Matan was able to identify which character threw a ball in the book.
“We had a conversation around a story, and second, it was a tangible moment that he showed me that he knows something that we can measure,” Cohen said. “This was an amazing moment because as a parent, you always know that your kid knows, but it’s hard for you to show tangible examples to outsiders, to teachers, to speech therapists.”
A proud Jew and Israeli, Cohen wants to instill this pride in his three children.
“When [Matan] is 13, he’ll do his bar mitzvah. When he goes to Jewish holidays, he needs to be able to participate in those type[s] of conversations,” Cohen explained. “It means that helping him build a sentence is not good enough … I’m looking at conversation and not the sentence.”
Verbali’s flagship product, an app called MaTalk AI, can generate conversational options in 6 seconds, a much quicker pace than the usual 45 seconds it takes to find a response using a standard AAC.
MaTalk is named for Cohen’s son, but there’s another meaning: in Hebrew, matok means “sweet.”
“He is sweet,” Cohen said of Matan. “All our kids are sweet. So the Jewish values are fundamentally in this.”
Cohen, who’s working on the new and improved version of a Verbali app, added that inclusion should be a real-life practice, not just something listed in a mission statement.
“It’s a value that you really need to live by, and I always give the inclusion at JCC’s camp as an example [of] my North Star,” he said. “Full inclusivity is to participate. Inclusivity needs to be accessibility. Inclusivity needs to be financial accessibility. All of those things the JCC camp fully stands by and lives by.”
zbell@midatlanticmedia.com
