I created a free website that can screen for cognitive decline in 60 seconds

by Jordan Fulghum, October 2025

My mom has dementia.

Getting to that diagnosis took years. The early tests were slow, vague, and expensive. Some were so subjective that two clinicians could look at the same answers and disagree.

I've been working on something that might make that step a little easier - for families, and maybe one day for doctors too. It's called VocalMaze.

What it does

VocalMaze can screen for signs of cognitive decline in about 60 seconds. You're shown an image, and you just describe what you see out loud into your device's microphone.

The site transcribes what you say and runs that text through a transformer (AI) model I fine-tuned to predict whether a person's language patterns resemble those seen in dementia. It doesn't analyze sound, tone, or emotion - just language.

That's the most remarkable thing I learned: we don't even need a waveform, or a spectogram, or a vocal embedding, or any audio. VocalMaze throws all of that away and just uses the transcript. In our family's experience, a simple transcript beat every measurement tool the doctors threw at the problem.

How it works

The model is a fine-tuned XLNet transformer trained on transcripts from DementiaBank, a public dataset used in clinical research. Each sample is a short description of a picture, labeled by whether the speaker was cognitively healthy or not.

With even just a small amount of data, the neural network can identify linguistic patterns: people with dementia use fewer nouns, more pronouns, shorter sentences, less temporal structure. The model learns those differences - the structure of thought showing up in syntax.

VocalMaze provides a statistical screen, not a medical diagnosis. In testing, it's about 82% accurate, which is roughly the same performance as traditional screening methods that take far longer.

Privacy

VocalMaze doesn't store anything. No accounts, no recordings, no transcripts, no results. There's literally not a database backing it.

The browser uses the microphone API to capture your voice, sends it to a speech-to-text service, the text is analyzed, and then everything disappears. Nothing is kept on my server, because there is no server.

If you want to send the test to someone else - like a parent or spouse - you can do that discreetly. The app emails them a link that simply says "try this short voice test to measure your health." When they complete it, only you get the result. It's private, but not deceptive.

Why I built it

I wish this had existed when my mom started showing signs. I learned that language can tell us a lot before memory loss becomes visible. You just need to listen.

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