Michael McAnally
Michael McAnally is a retired American software developer, futurist writer, and the Founder and former CEO of Touch Voice, a San Francisco company whose medical speaking apps helped thousands of speech-impaired people communicate in hospitals, convalescent care facilities, and homes around the world. Writing under the pen name Michael Blade, he publishes essays, fiction, poetry, and speculative science on transhumanism and the long-term future of humanity at Transhuman Singularity, the blog he has maintained since 2008.
Michael founded Touch Voice in May 2011 after one of his closest friends suffered a pulmonary embolism and woke in a hospital bed unable to speak. Finding only a laminated alphabet board in the room, and inspired by the computer voice that spoke for Stephen Hawking, Michael prototyped a web-based speaking app for the newly released Apple iPad. He then partnered with software engineer Frank Weiss, who coded an iOS version with an embedded speech engine while Michael designed the interface, and later bought out his cofounder.
Michael went on to design and develop eight medical-grade mobile apps, including Touch Voice, Touch Voice +, and Touch Voice Gold, which turn tablets, phones, and desktop browsers into Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices.
The apps address speech impairment arising from conditions such as stroke, ALS, traumatic brain injury, brain tumor, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, ataxia, dysarthria, laryngeal cancer, selective mutism, and Parkinson’s disease. Touch Voice was featured in Friendship Circle’s Five Text-to-Speech Apps Make Communication Easier for Individuals with Special Needs.
Michael ran the company as a self-funded venture — handling development, design, marketing, and around-the-clock email product support himself — until the business closed in May 2026. Read The Story of How I Developed Apps for the Speech Impaired, If life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade… My Story Of How I Developed A Medical App For The Speech Impaired, and How I Made a Successful App and Helped Thousands of Speech Impaired Persons to Communicate. Watch Touch Voice Gold Web App For Speech Impaired AAC.
Michael’s design process was grounded in field observation. He spent full days in his friend’s hospital room taking notes on lighting, medical equipment, ambient noise, and nurse rounds, then iterated the interface to accommodate users with limited manual dexterity, favoring large buttons on tablets over small phone screens.
For users whose cognitive impairments affect written word recognition, he added picture-based speaking buttons so that someone who cannot process the word “cat” can still communicate by touching a picture of one. Read A UI/UX For AAC Speech Impaired App.
As Michael Blade, Michael began publishing futurist writing online in 2008 with The Transhuman Singularity, the unfinished science fiction novella that sparked his blog of the same name. His subsequent work spans poetry, essays, and speculative science on mind uploading, posthuman evolution, and the far future of intelligence.
Following three years of personal AI research, he now runs open-source large language models on his own local AI workstation, using them to extend his early fiction into speculative analyses of advanced civilizations, and he authored The Virtual Human Operating System, a white paper proposing architectural guidelines for instantiating virtual human beings with AI technologies.
Read Posthuman, A Poem, The Basic Abilities Of Transhuman Uploads, and The Architects of Reality: Reviving an old sci-fi project with a new twist! Watch Packaging Digital Humans for Lightspeed Travel and Galaxy Colonization. In 2018, he was profiled by writer Ann Bradley in The Silicon Valley Story. Read Blogger, Coder, Futurist: Michael McAnally Describes This Life.
Michael’s software career spans more than three decades. He retired from the State of California in 2013 as a Staff Programmer Analyst, concluding 18.5 years of combined service across five state agencies, where he was a researcher and evangelist for new and emerging technologies, reported to executive management on technology adoption, and served as project lead, project manager, and business analyst using methodologies including Use Cases, UML, and Agile.
In 2000, he was a Solutions Architect with Zefer Corporation and Harvard Business School, designing solution architectures and advanced load-balancing designs for large-scale, highly transactional e-commerce websites serving Global 500 firms. From 1998 to 1999, he was Lead Software Developer in the Digital Media Division of Pearson, where he led a 12-person team building a database website cataloging over 1,600 Penguin Classics titles and programmed interactive science-teaching software for elementary school children.
He began his career between 1982 and 1988 as a video game developer working in assembly language and as a mainframe programmer for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. More recently, he spent four years developing WebXR/WebVR augmented and virtual reality applications with A-Frame and JavaScript.
Michael earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences, covering general and specific information systems, in 1986 from California State University, Sacramento, where he served a semester as President of the campus LGBTQ+ student organization. He earned his Associate of Arts degree in General Science and Mathematics from Cosumnes River College in 1983 and completed transfer units in Computer Science at Sacramento City College between 1982 and 1983.
Michael watched the 1969 Moon landing live on television as a young child at his grandparents’ house, a moment he credits with cementing his belief that anything is possible with enough dedication. He describes himself as a “temporary gathering of sentient stardust” and supports causes in education, the environment, human rights, and science and technology. He lives in San Francisco.
Read his Contributions on Medium.
Visit his LinkedIn profile and his Transhuman Singularity Homepage. Follow him on Facebook and X.