Debbie Deegan: I’d had a stroke and my voice was gone. I was lying there thinking, ‘If I’ve no voice, what am I?’

When Debbie Deegan suffered a mini stroke, she was in hospital for weeks, couldn’t sit up, and lost her voice. But when her son Mikey came home to look after her, the AI voice agent he developed to help her regain her speech proved invaluable

Debbie Deegan and her son Mikey

The morning of Debbie Deegan’s stroke in May of this year, she had tried lion’s mane mushrooms for the first time, for breakfast. “I’m in a WhatsApp food group, we’re called The Rabbits. I sent a photograph to everybody. And they were all asking, well, tell us what it’s like. So I ate it – big hairy thing. And the second I ate it, I felt wonky. I said to the food group, ‘I feel like I’m drunk.’”

The food group are called The Rabbits because they pretend to be vegetarians. “None of us really are. It’s going years. We share recipes and we talk about latest foods, about ten or 12 of us.”