She Built Her Brother a Voice After Cancer Took His Vocal Cords
When Amy's brother woke up from cancer surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, his voice box was gone. The surgeons had rebuilt his throat from tissue in his own leg, but at sixty years old, he would never speak again.
Jamie, whose love of golf became the heart of Wally.
A builder's question
Amy is his younger sister. She's fifty-eight, runs a coworking space in Salem, Massachusetts, and has never written a line of code. A year ago she couldn't have told you what an SVG file was. What she did have was a habit of building things with AI, one project leading to another until she'd made three platforms without ever learning to program. So when the surgery took his voice, she asked herself a builder's question. What can I make for him?
Amy built Wally for her brother without learning to code.
She tried the official channels first. She reached out to the hospital's speech team to ask what tools existed, whether anyone was using modern voice AI, what her brother was supposed to do when he got home and couldn't call for help in the middle of the night. She got nowhere. She contacted Apple about using his phone as a voice aid and found a buried feature too cumbersome for a man who doesn't know how to forward an email. The dedicated devices she researched, called AAC tools, looked like they hadn't been updated in years.
"I got flattened," she says. "Thank god I got flattened, because I had to go build it."
Golf on the surface, a voice aid underneath
She opened Manus and started architecting. She knew a medical device would sit unused in a drawer, so she wrapped the whole thing in the one subject her brother loves most: golf. She gave it a warm name, Wally, and built it to live on his phone's home screen like any other app.
Wally greets Jamie like a golf companion, not a clinical device.
Every morning Wally sends him a new message. The week he came home, it read: Morning, Jamie. Just wanted to say how good it is knowing you're waking up in your own bed today. The Genesis Scottish Open is on this week, so we'll have some good golf to watch. Thinking of you, mate. Wally pulls live tournament scores from ESPN, serves him golf news from around the world, and lets him bet against the AI on every weekend tournament. Jamie picks a player and gives his reasoning, Wally argues back with its own, and they keep a running score. Amy gets text messages from her brother now that say things like "I'm minus seven and Wally's minus two."
Jamie on the golf course before surgery.
The words that make a life
Underneath the golf sits the part that matters most. When the app opens, it goes straight to his voice aid. One tap and Wally speaks for him. Amy prebuilt the urgent phrases: I am having trouble breathing. My airway feels blocked. I need suctioning now. Something is wrong with my stoma. She built the everyday ones: I'm tired, I need the TV remote, can you sit with me. Then there are the ones for his granddaughters: I'm proud of you. Don't worry about me. Can we watch something together? Give me a hug. Those cut the deepest. In those first weeks after surgery, when he was communicating through whiteboards and scraps of paper, his hardest moments were with the girls. He wanted to tell them he was proud of them and couldn't.
The voice aid puts urgent help, daily needs, feelings, and family phrases within one tap.
She built one more phrase after his first night home, when his dog, Shaymis, got out and he stood in the doorway unable to call for him. He told Amy he might have to give Shaymis away because he couldn't say his name. Now there's a button in Wally for it: "Come here, Shaymis."
There's also a medical ID page listing his surgery, his medications, and his emergency contacts, written so that anyone who picks up his phone can help him. That was for the grandkids as much as for him. Amy gathered them around Wally and showed them how it worked, so an eleven-year-old home alone with her grandfather would never have to guess what medications he takes or who to call. She watched one granddaughter teach the other. The girls leave him messages inside the app now. So glad you're home. I love you so much.
Jamie's family can leave messages for him inside Wally.
Amy gave him Wally on his sixtieth birthday, in his hospital bed, twenty-eight days into his stay, with their mother beside them. He couldn't eat a birthday cake because he couldn't swallow, so this was his gift. Nobody could stop crying. "He said, this could help open my world," she remembers.
Amy and her mother with Jamie and Wally in the hospital.
What comes next
She keeps building. When Jamie mentioned he never liked the LIV tour, she pulled it from his news feed and added the LPGA, sitting next to him on the couch, updating the app in real time as his needs changed. When one of his nurses mentioned she had no Father's Day gift, Amy asked what her dad loved. Tennis and the Bible. She went home and built Stan, which sends him tennis news and a Bible verse every morning. His daughter says he's obsessed.
Now Amy is reaching out to tracheostomy associations. She thinks Wally could work for stroke survivors, for autistic adults, for anyone who has lost speech and doesn't want a clinical device that treats them like a patient. Her approach stays the same no matter who it's for.
"Just imagine," she says. "I'm fifty-eight, never touched technology, never coded until a year ago, and I built my brother something very powerful."
He needed a way to ask for help in the night. He also wanted to call his dog and tell his granddaughters he was proud of them. Wally lets him say those things again.
In memory of Jamie Brimicombe (1966–2026). Jamie passed away on August 11, 2026. Wally began as Amy’s gift to her brother and remains part of his legacy—a reminder that technology can be deeply personal, practical, and human.
