Neural Notes: AI meets autism support with the Understanding Zoe chatbot

Welcome back to Neural Notes, where I look at some of the most interest AI news and businesses in Australia. This week, early stage startup Understanding Zoe has created a platform to help parents and caregivers with neurodivergent children.

According to co-founder and CEO Laetitia Andrac, Understanding Zoe was started by accident. She and husband Johan Erchoff, who is also a cofounder, found themselves as parents grappling with the overwhelming task of managing their daughter Zoe’s autism diagnosis.

“We had degrees and were high-functioning adults and yet we were lost,” Andrac said to SmartCompany.

After receiving a 35-page diagnosis report and a laundry list of therapies to manage, they went searching for a tool to help make sense of the mountain of information and provide strategies in moments of heightened emotion.

It didn’t exist, so they built their own. Now, it’s part of Techstars Sydney’s latest accelerator cohort.

Using OpenAI’s Playground, they created a bot that served as a personalised guide for Zoe’s care. What began as a tool for their family quickly found its way into the hands of Zoe’s teachers, therapists, and other parents.

“I shared the link of this bot that [the teacher] could access in the classroom. After the first week of using it she sent a very long email saying how it helped her,” Andrac said.

From parents and teachers to therapists and medical professionals, Understanding Zoe allows multiple users to access and contribute to a child’s care plan. Roles are customisable, and parents have full control over what each user can see, ensuring sensitive information remains private.

Understanding Zoe wants to take the pressure off parents and professional caregivers

Understanding Zoe isn’t just about helping children — it’s about easing the mental load on parents, caregivers, and teachers.

By offering immediate strategies for managing challenging situations, the app enables caregivers to act quickly and effectively. And they can do this without having to contact the parents. The platform takes some of the emotional and mental labour from them.

“I don’t need to always be the person they ask. I don’t need to repeat myself every single day… it provides them the right approach in the moment,” Andrac said.

It also helps reduce stress for parents in those tough moments.

“When Zoe says ‘I’m having big feelings’, instead of acting from a place of myself being dysregulated I can go to the app,” Andrac said.

Andrac went on to describe one exercise where she got Zoe to imagine blowing a big balloon full of all of her bad feelings and watching it float away.

“We can sit down and do that together,” Andrac said.

For working parents, it has the opportunity to be a lifeline. The platform wants to help bridge the gap between school, therapy, and home life, minimising disruptions like emergency phone calls and meetings.

“It’s removing the emotional load, the mental load, but also providing better care for the child and continuity of care,” Andrac said.

“One teacher also said that now, rather than having to struggle to regulate a child for a few minutes and so on, they find the right answer and approach very quickly.”

One corporate partnership is already in the works to bring Understanding Zoe into the B2B realm – providing the platform to employees who are caregivers, demonstrating its potential for workplace impact.

One example of the platform’s potential is the creation of Individualised Education Programs. Teachers can save hours by pulling relevant insights from a child’s profile without sifting through lengthy diagnostic reports.

In another case, a support worker used the app to find real-time strategies for managing a challenging behaviour.

A focus on privacy and security

The need for privacy and security should always be at the forefront of AI products, particularly those that involve children and medical records.

With multiple people being able to access a child’s personal bot, this was a concern for Understanding Zoe.

According to Andrac, parents act as administrators, deciding who can access what. Sensitive documents can be flagged as private, and only relevant information is shared with support networks.

In regards to AI training, the platform complies with GDPR and other international privacy regulations, and data uploaded is used solely to train a child’s personalised bot.

Andrac said that herself and her husband look at it through the lens of this platform including their daughter’s data.

“It’s personal, it’s sensitive, and we’re committed to protecting it,” Andrac said.

Affordability is at the forefront of Understanding Zoe

At $10 per month, Understanding Zoe is designed to be affordable, especially compared to the high costs of autism diagnosis, which can cost thousands of dollars. Then there is the ongoing medical and therapy costs for some families.

While Understanding Zoe has envisioned a future where it is a part of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), it isn’t its main focus.

“The NDIS is definitely something we would love to see happen, but we are not too tied to it. We’re thinking about the parents who don’t necessarily have NDIS funding… if at some point they’re happy to take us on, we will do it.”

With 20 paying users in beta and more joining each week, Understanding Zoe is scaling carefully while maintaining its personalised touch.

And while its current offering is on children, the vision is much larger: a neuro-inclusive world that empowers the 1.6 billion neurodivergent individuals globally.

For Andrac, the mission is deeply personal.

“It started from a place of desperation and darkness, and now it’s really the next mission in my life. My legacy would be to build a more neuro-inclusive world and provide an ability for everyone to understand themselves,” Andrac said.

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