He beat his stutter with a tech invention. Then he found the voice to help others

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

Shmuel Horowitz didn’t remember a time when he could really communicate and express himself. His stuttering prevented him from opening his mouth from the time he was a kid, and although he excelled in so many other areas, he resigned himself to his speech impediment forever. Until an interactive therapy changed his life — and then he knew he could make life better for so many others, too

AT age 29, Shmuel Horowitz had long since come to terms with the persistent stutter that had accompanied him since childhood. By then, the most daunting phases of life for someone with a speech impediment — cheder, yeshivah, the nerve-racking parshah of shidduchim — were already behind him. He had built a life, started a family. Everyone had their own struggles, he thought, and a severe speech impediment was his particular burden to carry through life.

That thought gave Horowitz, a Gerrer chassid from Bnei Brak, a certain peace of mind. “I had tried every technique out there to overcome it,” he says “There really wasn’t much more I could do.”

Or so he thought.

Because after almost three decades of stuttering — after a youth of near-silence, and the long, hard climb to succeed despite his impediment — Shmuel Horowitz revolutionized his life. Not only did he finally overcome his stutter, he opened up undreamed-of horizons in healthcare that have helped many others on both sides of the Atlantic.

“My stutter used to be very, very severe,” says Horowitz, whose current speech is nearly flawless, save for a few faint remnants — pauses, expressions, hesitations that hint at a deeper history. “You really can’t imagine what it used to be like for me to talk. There were moments when I just froze. Eventually I developed tics — something pretty common in people with speech difficulties — just from the anxiety.”

The path out of that morass came when someone mentioned yet another specialist who suggested a particular treatment — not revolutionary in its method, but in its implementation: It was a digital platform that allowed users to practice treatment on their own terms, in their own homes, whenever they had time.

When Horowitz’s longtime buddy, a fellow by the name of Avraham Sheinfeld, noticed a clear improvement in his friend’s speech, he became curious. And that’s when he learned about a system of remote treatment operating out of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital. The program allowed a person struggling with stuttering to build exercises and practice sessions into his day, at his convenience, and then receive direct feedback from a professional.

Once Sheinfeld perceived the change in his friend’s speech, he saw in it the makings of something much larger — a business model, a new path forward in digital health with massive potential in the lucrative worldwide healthcare market. With some upgrades and refinements, practically any kind of therapy could be handled this way.

Today, what began as a personal journey toward speech fluency has evolved into a tech startup with ambitions that now stretch well beyond Israel. Sitting in the polished Bnei Brak offices of Novotalk, the company the two friends now head, the partners tell a compelling story of how the struggle to overcome adversity can unleash something more powerful and far-reaching than anyone imagined.