Every time you speak, your brain does something remarkable. It tracks the conversation, plans what to say, finds the words under time pressure, builds the sentence, sets the rhythm and emphasis, and moves your breath, tongue, and lips to turn a thought into sound. It does all of this in real time, hundreds of times a day.
When any part of that system shifts, your speech shifts with it. If you’re tired, your pace slows. If you’re stressed, your pitch narrows. If you’re overloaded, you reach for filler words and lose the thread. You can’t see those changes, but you can hear them.
Soma helps you listen and understand the patterns hidden in your own voice.
Backed by scientific research
Decades of studies link speech and the mind, and show the voice to be a rich signal of both.
How your mind is working
20+ years of research on memory and cognition reveal that when thinking becomes less efficient, sentences simplify, vocabulary narrows, and pauses lengthen.
How you’re feeling inside
Studies indicate that day-to-day fluctuations like stress and energy also leave their traces in vocal patterns like pitch, loudness, and timing.
How you’re showing up to others
Research shows that others perceive you through your speech. Using filler words or particular vocabulary affects how confident or trustworthy you sound.
Built with scientific rigor
Soma is built by scientists and clinicians from places like Oxford, Harvard, and MIT who specialize in cognition and speech. Our advisors have researched, treated patients with neurological conditions, and built companies around voice biomarkers for cognitive change.
What Soma captures
What you say and how you say it both matter. Soma is built on science conducted by our team of scientists and scientific advisors. What we capture is deliberately chosen so that the ever-changing environment of natural speech does not disrupt the quality and validity of our metrics.
Acoustics
Pitch range, expressiveness, and loudness can signal stress, energy, and how others read your certainty.
Language
Word choice, sentence structure, and how ideas connect can signal how efficiently and clearly you’re thinking.
Timing
Pace, pauses, and hesitations can signal mental capacity and fatigue.
Dynamics
How you interact with other speakers, like your response time and how you match their speech patterns, can signal engagement and rapport.
What Soma measures
Your voice reflects your internal state and shapes how you’re experienced by others.
Brain score
How organized and coherent your thinking is, as reflected in the structure and logic of your speech. Higher clarity suggests sharper mental focus and less cognitive interference.
Performance score
How quickly and effectively you’re thinking, reflected in how sharply you process information and respond in dialogue. Higher efficiency suggests your mind is doing more with less effort: strong processing and low overhead.
Soma improves around your baseline
Everyone’s voice is different. Some people naturally speak fast, others speak more monotone. A one-size-fits-all standard would call half the world foggy.
Speech doesn’t just differ between people, it also moves within you. Research shows that day-to-day changes in one person’s speech track day-to-day changes in how that person says they feel.
Soma starts by learning your normal first. Over your first three days, it builds a baseline of how you sound when you’re just being you, and every score after that is measured as a shift from it.
As you use Soma over longer periods of time, our insights improve as we better understand your normal and what drives your fluctuations.
Transparency is important to us
We’re honest about our limits. Soma works best for natural conversations. We’re continuing to improve our insights so that they encompass the different factors that could affect how you speak: who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and whether you are talking in a callbox at the office or on a noisy street downtown. As we continue to conduct our own validation studies, we’ll share our results here.
Questions
Will Soma diagnose me with cognitive decline?
No, Soma infers, it does not detect disease or make diagnoses. Soma’s scores estimate everyday shifts in how your mind is doing, drawn from patterns in your speech. They’re built on decades of published research, but they are inferences, not measurements of your brain. Treat them the way you’d treat a sleep score: a good signal about yourself, but not a verdict. Soma is not a medical device.
What if I catch a cold or use a different microphone?
Soma measures you against your own baseline rather than a universal standard. A cold shifts your voice for everyone, but Soma will show it as a shift from your normal. Speaking in a noisy room or with a different microphone can also affect a single session, which is why trends over days matter more than any one score.
Does speaking different languages affect my Soma scores?
Soma primarily supports English. You can speak other languages with Soma, but the scores and insights are not yet validated.
Can Soma detect when I lie?
No, Soma is not a lie detector or a mind reader. It measures your mental state, not what you’re thinking or whether you mean it.
Can I use Soma in a study?
We’re interested. If you’re a researcher working on speech, cognition, or wellbeing, write to science@soma-health.co.