Locked into Quiet

Like most children raised in the Gur chassidus, Shmuel grew up amid a society of crowded classrooms, large families, and a sea of children. In such an environment, just being withdrawn could carry a social cost. Yet in Shmuel’s case, it wasn’t about being shy or introverted. Fully aware of his difficulty, Shmuel spoke only when absolutely necessary — and often even less than that.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t stutter,” he recalls. “From the age of six or seven, every time I had to speak with strangers, and sometimes with friends, the words would just stop in my throat. I’m a naturally sociable person, I like to express myself, but people would laugh, or finish my sentences for me. It was embarrassing, often humiliating.”

Growing up with a speech impediment isn’t easy. “You begin to avoid certain activities just to protect yourself,” he remembers. “And any kind of change — starting school, switching to a new yeshivah — triggers stress, which only makes the stutter worse. You’re trying to make new friends while battling self-esteem issues tied to your speech.”

Shmuel’s parents first recognized the seriousness of the problem when he was just five years old. From that point onward, they tried every intervention and therapy available for the eldest of their thirteen children.

“Every treatment you can imagine, I tried it,” Shmuel says. “My parents invested a huge amount of money, and tried every segulah they heard about. Anytime someone mentioned that they knew a therapist who might help, my parents would immediately get me an appointment.”

When he was nine years old, Shmuel’s parents considered trying a new treatment at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. But that required the family to uproot for three weeks at a time, living in a hotel or short-term rental while Shmuel underwent therapy sessions. Thousands of children had supposedly been helped by this method, but for a chassidish family from Bnei Brak, the environment was completely foreign. His father couldn’t imagine leaving his son in mixed classes with secular children.

“It wasn’t just the struggle of speaking,” Shmuel says of those years. “It was the constant anxiety. Every trip to the grocery store, every meeting with a stranger, every doctor’s appointment, I worried: Will they laugh at me? Will they help me finish the sentence? Or will they just cut me off?”

And so the years passed, and the stutter remained, through school and yeshivah, leaving him dreading situations that required speaking. “One time at a dentist appointment, the dentist told my mother, right in front of me, ‘This child isn’t being raised properly. That’s why he stutters.’ I was twelve years old. You can imagine how that made me feel.”

Bar mitzvah, usually the happiest milestone of a boy’s youth, filled him with dread.

“Most boys look forward to that day,” Horowitz reflects. “For me, it was a nightmare. How would I get through my aliyah? How would I recite the derashah? Would I freeze for minutes in front of everyone?

“I remember a conversation I once had with my father, about whether it was a Divine decree that I had to accept living with stuttering. But my father didn’t agree. He said that many times, Divine Will means precisely that we should seek treatment, that we should look for a solution. A person struggling financially shouldn’t just sit around waiting for handouts, even if he doesn’t understand the Divine plan. We can never know the ultimate purpose of our challenges, but if Hashem sends us a particular trial, it doesn’t necessarily mean He wants us to accept it passively. Sometimes our job is to do everything possible to overcome it.”

Stuttering brings with it family challenges, even among those with the best intentions.

“A lot of people who live with a stutterer end up making crucial mistakes — even with the best intentions — that end up hurting the person,” Shmuel says, “and that’s why parents are a stutterer’s first line of defense.

“Unless you’re the child’s parent, don’t give advice,” he says. “And never say things like ‘just relax,’ or try to give them a motivational speech. Don’t try to encourage them with chizuk. What matters most is just listening. Don’t talk about the stutter. Don’t try to fix it. Just pay attention. Quietly. Listen to what they’re saying.”

It sounds simple, even obvious, in a world in which the stigma surrounding many conditions has receded. But Shmuel insists it’s not widely understood. “You’d be surprised how many well-meaning people make those mistakes all the time.”

It Wouldn’t Define Me

The transition to yeshivah brought new worries. “I was anxious about meeting new people,” Horowitz says. “Would the other bochurim accept me? Would they laugh at me? Would they look down on me?”

To his relief, the bochurim in Chiddushei HaRim Gur in Tel Aviv were warm and accepting.

“I have only good memories of those years,” he says. “Still, the stutter was with me every day. I tried countless therapies, endless segulos, every idea anyone suggested. Sometimes I felt a little improvement, but never anything lasting. Each failure left me more disheartened.”

The speech problem became a cloud over his future.

“I realized this wasn’t just about daily embarrassment,” Horowitz says. “It was holding me back from life itself. There were things I knew I would never be able to do, and I’m not even talking about speaking in front of a crowd. Even something as simple as buying a rekel meant bringing along a friend, just so he could speak to the salesman instead of me.”

When it came time for shidduchim, the stutter loomed larger than ever. “People hinted that it would be difficult, that girls would hesitate. My father was even told outright that perhaps I should lower my standards and settle for a girl with some issue.”

But then the penny dropped, and Shmuel made a decision that would impact him for the rest of his life. “I told myself: I won’t let my speech impediment derail my life. That I wouldn’t allow my limitation to define me. And so I pushed myself forward — even to take leadership roles in yeshivah. I became head of a chaburah, where I was required to give over divrei Torah in front of dozens of bochurim. Each time I was terrified, but each time I forced myself through.”

His determination eventually bore fruit. At 22, he became a chassan, and a year later, a father. (Today, they have six children.)

“I’m not going to say that the stuttering wasn’t an issue, but I’d built myself up in other areas so I guess she felt it was worth the tradeoff,” Shmuel says easily. Still, he acknowledges that his wife was one of the key people pushing him to keep seeking treatment, even at times when he’d resigned himself to living with stuttering until 120.

“By then,” he says, “I’d become used to living with the problem. It was part of me, I accepted it, and honestly, despite my wife’s high hopes, I didn’t believe it would ever change.”

First-Time Results

But then, Horowitz heard about a top-tier neurologist from Chicago who was visiting Israel and who specialized in stuttering.

“Throughout my life,” Shmuel relates, “I’d heard about all kinds of recommendations and professionals who were supposedly going to help me, but this professor’s name kept resurfacing. His parents live in Israel, so he would visit often. And when he did, he was kind enough to offer free consultations to people with speech difficulties.”

Shmuel prefers not to name him, but the neurologist’s advice was unequivocal: He recommended a specific treatment at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.

Years earlier, as a child, Shmuel had heard about the special therapy at Hadassah, but back then it involved weeks of in-person sessions, essentially relocating to Jerusalem and checking into the hospital’s hotel for a month. At the time, the cost was prohibitive, and it also meant putting regular life on pause.

This time, though, technology had changed everything.

“The new thing,” the professor told him, “is that they’ve rolled out a system they call ‘Novotalk.’ You can now do the entire treatment from home.”

Shmuel reached out to Hadassah. “They told me all I needed was a computer,” he says. No travel, no hotels, no upheaval of daily life. That, in itself, was revolutionary. Traditionally, these intense treatments required almost total availability from the patient. It meant freezing life for at least a month, devoting oneself completely to the process, and scheduling everything around the limited time slots of various professionals. For most people, it just wouldn’t work.

What struck Shmuel now was that for the first time, the proposal seemed genuinely feasible. And even more surprising was that for the first time ever, he actually began seeing measurable results.

“From the very first session,” he says. “I felt it — this is it. This is my salvation. I knew I’d found the key that had been missing all my life.”

The therapy worked through structured exercises, training both memory and speech muscles, guiding the user step by step — sounds, words, then sentences. The technology gave precise feedback, while a therapist monitored progress.

“The difference was unbelievable. Within weeks, my speech was transformed. I heard myself speaking fluently — something I’d never before experienced. I felt as if chains had been broken.”

At its core, Novotalk is really quite simple: a remote therapy platform that delivers personalized care, continually adapting to the needs of the user. The definition sounds almost underwhelming — bare bones — but for Horowitz and many others like him, it was a game changer. Six years ago, when he first encountered the service, it reshaped everything he thought he understood about his own limitations.

Novotalk’s method wasn’t magic — it was science. Computer-assisted therapy was actually developed by Dr. Ronald Webster back in the 1970s, in which both speech muscles and memory were retrained through repetitive exercises.

“It’s not only about the voice,” Shmuel explains. “Stuttering is a deeply physiological problem. The therapy teaches you to retrain the brain and muscles, to program them with new speech patterns.”

In practice, that meant breaking language down into steps: first breathing, then syllables, then words, then full sentences. A sentence like “I am going” might be practiced slowly, syllable by syllable: “I–a–m go–ing.” With time, the new rhythm became embedded in the brain.

The computer detected the user’s tone, pace, clarity, and precision — things the human ear might miss — and provided instant feedback. Meanwhile, a therapist reviewed each session remotely, noting where improvement was needed.

Within weeks, Shmuel felt a dramatic change.

New Frontiers

“It was astonishing,” he says. “My speech became fluent. I heard myself speaking in a way I’d always dreamed of since I was a kid. I felt it gave me a new lease on life. But more than that — I saw that this wasn’t just for me. This had the power to change the lives of thousands.”

When Shmuel Horowitz made the breakthrough, it was those around him — friends, family, old acquaintances — who noticed first. Chief among them was his friend Avraham Sheinfeld.

“Shmuel and I have been friends since cheder,” Avraham says. “We’ve been through a lot together, but I’d never actually asked him about his stutter. But when I noticed the change, I couldn’t help but ask what had happened. He said, ‘Novotalk.’ And I said, ‘There’s a business here.’ ”

Sheinfeld wasn’t exaggerating. What he saw wasn’t just a clever workaround for people like Shmuel — it was a new paradigm. A way to sidestep the traditional burdens of therapy: travel, scheduling, stigma, cost. If speech therapy could be restructured this way, why not occupational therapy, or even mental health counseling?

For Shmuel, that ambition struck a chord as well: It wasn’t enough to keep this gift to himself.

It’s estimated that today, approximately 1.5 billion people around the world suffer from some form of voice, speech, or language impairment. And while much attention is paid to the mechanical aspects of treatment — the drills, exercises, and feedback loops — there are often deeper levels to tackle for real, long-term success.

“I realized there was enormous potential here,” says Shmuel. “Thousands of people could benefit — especially in the frum community. But Novotalk had no presence among heimishe Yidden. I knew this was my mission: not only to heal myself, but to bring this solution to others.”

This got Sheinfeld and Horowitz thinking. While stuttering might have been the origin point — the initial use case that launched the platform — they were thinking way beyond Novotalk exclusively as a speech therapy platform. What if it could be a blueprint for remote medical support across multiple domains?

“We realized this could apply to any medical field that shares the same characteristics,” Sheinfeld says. “That means any treatment that requires patients to perform certain exercises on their own, but doesn’t necessarily demand the constant presence of a doctor.”

The idea to transform the long-standing Hadassah speech therapy treatment into an online platform called Novotalk didn’t originate in a boardroom or research lab, but among the very people it was designed to help. A group of former patients — who had experienced real progress through the traditional program — began to notice something troubling. With time, the improvements in their speech would wane. The techniques they’d learned faded without reinforcement. It became clear to them that the original treatment, while effective, wasn’t enough. What they needed was a way to continuously train with an ongoing structure that would both encourage and, to some extent, compel them to practice regularly, while offering consistent evaluation from professionals.

What they also began to realize was that technology had caught up to their needs. With current capabilities, there was no longer any reason a patient should have to schedule appointments, travel to a clinic or hospital, and then, once there, undergo only occasional monitoring. More to the point, there was a simple truth few in the medical profession like to acknowledge: Even the best specialist has no real way of knowing whether a patient is following through with prescribed exercises.

“A clinician can assign an endless list of drills,” says Sheinfeld, “but they never truly know if the patient is doing them. With the platform, it’s all recorded — it’s clear whether the person has done the exercises or not.”

Horwitz and Sheinfeld were soon introduced to Zohar Bar-Yehuda, Novotalk’s CEO.

“We thought we’d found a diamond,” Shmuel recalls. “But Zohar told us we hadn’t found one diamond — we’d found a treasure.”

Real-Time Feedback

That treasure is built on an AI interface, and I decide to see for myself. The first figure to greet me is “Emily,” a virtual therapist designed to guide users through the process. The interface is clean, the voice calm, reassuring. To begin, the program asks me to speak a series of randomly generated words into my computer microphone. The platform then analyzes my pronunciation and assigns a level of speech difficulty based on the data. The exercises continue: full sentences, longer texts, varying paces. Each step is recorded and saved to my personal profile. That profile is accessible to Novotalk’s professional team.

The platform is more than a technical tool; it becomes a kind of traveling companion. In gradual stages, it guides the patient step-by-step, almost like a personal training program, with every advancement reinforced by carefully placed positive cues. The aim is not only to strengthen speech, but also to create an environment where the patient feels safe, supported, and understood.

The first module is devoted to relaxation. Here, one learns the essentials: How to sit, how to breathe, how to recognize tension in the body. This seemingly simple beginning reveals that speech is not an automatic reflex but a layered process involving posture, breath, rhythm, and confidence. For those who struggle with speech, every word is the culmination of countless micro-decisions, weighed and measured even before a sound leaves the lips.

The approach is not purely mechanical. Through a companion podcast, the platform delivers messages of emotional support: to be gentle with one’s own missteps and to acknowledge even the smallest victories.

Thanks to a blend of natural language processing, voice recognition, and real-time analytics, the patient receives immediate feedback — either from the software itself or from “Emily” — on how accurately they’ve completed each task, and where improvement is needed. At the same time, all results, logs, and timestamps are compiled into a report accessible to clinicians.

What this means is that patients can log in and complete sessions whenever it suits them. And doctors can evaluate those sessions when they have time. There’s no need for synchronized appointments or fixed meeting places. If I want to do my session at 11 p.m., I can. If the clinician checks it the next morning at 9 a.m., they can. And if they need more context, they can listen to my recordings themselves.

“The biggest advantage,” Sheinfeld explains, “is that the platform gives the patient real-time feedback — whether they’re doing it right or not — and at the same time, the doctor receives not only the performance data but also the actual audio of the exercises being done. In a traditional setting, the clinician sees the patient and tells them to practice a set of exercises for the next visit. But neither the patient nor the doctor knows if they were done, or done properly, or how consistent the practice was.”

Soon, Novotalk expanded beyond Israel, running pilot programs in New York and New Jersey, and partnering with leading universities and private foundations. American schools — often struggling to find enough speech therapists — began adopting the platform as well.

“In many areas, there is either a shortage of speech therapists or therapy budgets, meaning that schools can’t always provide what children need,” Shmuel explains. “Novotalk gives them a solution — therapy available online, tailored to each child, without the waiting lists.”

Since its inception, Novotalk has followed a trajectory familiar to those in the world of digital health startups. What began as a modest concept has grown into a fully operational system, recognized not only by clinicians but by the Israeli government itself. From early-stage buzz among investors, Novotalk has steadily climbed the ladder of legitimacy in both the public and professional spheres.

“The biggest hurdle wasn’t the medical community, but getting government recognition for Novotalk as an official treatment tool,” Shmuel says. Today, patients in Israel who enroll in Novotalk’s speech therapy program are eligible to receive reimbursements of up to 50 percent from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national social security system.

Find Your Voice

Still, despite local successes and a robust user base in Israel, Horowitz and Sheinfeld considered the company to be still in its infancy, until a breakthrough came across the Atlantic. Novotalk entered into a joint venture with Mount Sinai Health System in the United States — a partnership they look to with huge expectations. Mount Sinai is one of the largest and most prestigious healthcare systems in the United States, encompassing a medical school, a nursing school, and seven hospitals spread across the New York metropolitan area, plus outpatient and research facilities.

Through its joint venture with Mount Sinai Health, Novotalk is about to launch Novotalk 2.0, a HIPAA-compliant US system that will hopefully help stutterers build confidence and fluency with efficient and affordable service.

But listen to Horowitz and Sheinfeld, and they’ll tell you that speech therapy is just the company’s point of entry. They envision Novotalk becoming the dominant model in the rapidly expanding world of telemedicine.

“The platform can be applied to far more than just stuttering,” says Sheinfeld. “One obvious example is physical therapy. Just as the software analyzes speech through sound, with cameras it can track motion. If a patient is instructed to raise their arm to a ninety-degree angle and can’t quite manage it, the system can detect that. It knows when the movement isn’t right.

“When you think about it,” he continues, “probably ninety percent of people will need some kind of therapeutic treatment at some point in their lives. If our system can deliver results as effectively as it has for speech impairments, the logic is pretty straightforward: Who wants to waste time booking appointments, commuting, sitting in waiting rooms, losing work hours and family time, when you could be receiving the same care from your living room?”

Still, despite their enthusiasm for innovation, the founders are keen to point out that Novotalk’s technological sophistication doesn’t compromise its kashrus standards.

“The system’s halachic integrity was nonnegotiable,” Sheinfeld stresses. The platform, they note, has received approval from even the most stringent communications watchdogs in Israel, including NetFree, whose standards are among the strictest in the world.

Today, close to ten thousand people have already used Novotalk’s platform, and with Mount Sinai health and international investors behind it, the company is expanding to more markets. Yet even as the partners are looking out at the horizon, Shmuel never forgot his original motivation, which still remains deeply personal.

“For me, the greatest joy is seeing Yidden from our own communities benefit. I know what it feels like to be laughed at, to avoid speaking, to carry that burden,” he says. “This began with my own stutter. I never dreamed it would become something global. But every time I hear a Yid who once struggled now speaking fluently, I feel Hashem has given me the zechus to turn my pain into a gift for others. To be able to give others the tools to find their voice — that’s the biggest simchah.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1082)