Five Ways to Use ChatGPT in Your Speech Therapy Sessions

The holiday season is over, our New Year’s resolutions are wavering, and our creativity is running low. What can an exhausted SLP do? Try ChatGPT! This is the second post in our 2025 series on practical therapy tools and ideas, and I’m excited to share five ways to use ChatGPT in your speech therapy sessions.

ChatGPT can help us make it through the winter (and beyond!), but I do want to acknowledge some caveats. The first is that there are legitimate concerns related to using ChatGPT, especially in educational settings. We need to be cautious about privacy, and we should avoid including any type of protected health information in a ChatGPT query.

ChatGPT also raises important ethical questions. Its environmental impact is huge, and that impact has a disproportionate effect on regions that are vulnerable to drought and other climate-related issues. In addition, ChatGPT (and similar generative AI tools) could exacerbate existing socioeconomic disparities, although it also has the potential to improve them.

Given these concerns, as well as our varying comfort levels with technology, there are many different opinions in the SLP community about ChatGPT. Some SLPs have embraced it, some haven’t tried it, and most of us are probably somewhere in between. (If you’re brand new to ChatGPT, you may want to check out ChatGPT and the SLP for some introductory information!)

My hope for today’s post is that it will provide an accessible starting point for anyone who has dabbled in ChatGPT and wants to use it more regularly in their speech sessions. If you’re a ChatGPT pro, you’re probably already familiar with these ideas and have plenty to add, so please share your suggestions in the comments!

One final caveat: be sure to look into any ChatGPT-related regulations at your workplace before you get started!

Now let’s jump into these five ideas:

Session Planning

I feel confident that ChatGPT won’t be taking our jobs anytime soon (or ever). There’s just too much that we provide in terms of building relationships, tailoring interventions to specific students, and thinking critically about data. However, ChatGPT can do some aspects of our jobs, which frees us up to focus elsewhere. So I love to ask ChatGPT to give me ideas for session activities, especially when it’s a mixed group and I have limited materials available!

As an example, here’s a prompt I gave ChatGPT asking for session ideas to use with a (made-up) language and articulation group:

“I’m a pediatric speech-language pathologist working in a public elementary school. I have a group of four energetic first-grade students who I see together in the same group. Three of the students are working on language skills, specifically regular past tense verbs and following directions. One of the students is working on articulation, specifically the /l/ sound in the initial position. I have a deck of cards, markers and paper, and a beach ball. Please create an engaging schedule/lesson plan/list of activities for a 30 minute session with these four students.”

The resulting lesson plan from ChatGPT had some fun ideas! Here’s a summary (the full results from ChatGPT went into greater detail):

Warm up by tossing the ball and acting out various verbs
Create a collaborative verb-focused story using the paper and markers
Practice following directions using the playing cards (a red card=jump up and down, a king=high-five a friend, etc.)
Play a review game with the beach ball (toss it to each student and ask what they learned/worked on)

My only complaint was that the articulation element of the session felt like an afterthought, so if I wanted to use it with actual students, I would either make some adjustments, or give ChatGPT a new prompt and ask it to try again.

Ultimately, it might not be practical to have ChatGPT plan all of your sessions (if you do, I’d love to hear about it!), but it’s so valuable when you’re out of ideas or just want to mix things up.

Stories

ChatGPT is a master of personalized stories! You could use it to create a sound-loaded story about a student’s favorite topic, a story starter for a client to finish, a story that demonstrates a social communication concept, or even a story about a student (but be careful with privacy, names, and identifying details!). You could also have it produce interactive stories like murder mysteries or escape rooms.

What I love most about asking ChatGPT to write stories is that I can be incredibly specific in terms of grade level, setting, characters, vocabulary, articulation words, and any other relevant parameters! I end up with the exact story I need, and it only takes a few minutes.

Meaningful Articulation Words

It can be so challenging to target articulation at the sentence and conversation levels! It often feels like we have to choose between focusing on high numbers of productions or using meaningful words in an authentic context. But with ChatGPT, we can have it all!

When I’m planning a session for students who are working on articulation at the conversation level, I like to start by choosing a game or activity (e.g., Uno! or a simple craft), and then ask ChatGPT for a list of words that contain the students’ target sounds and are relevant to the day’s activity. If I have time, I might print the list and use it as an informal data sheet to track productions during the session.

Describing and Image Generation

There have been many updates to ChatGPT since it was first released to the public in 2022, and for me, one of the most exciting updates was when the free version of ChatGPT began allowing access to its image generation function! Just a few minutes ago, I asked for an image of a “superhero pug saving a kitten who is stuck in a tree,” and the results were adorable.

The possibilities for using this tool in speech therapy are nearly endless! The more detailed the prompt, the more accurate the image, so it’s perfect for students who are working on describing or language expansion. You could also ask for an image full of items that contain a target sound, or for an image to illustrate a student-created story.

One downside is that the free version of ChatGPT limits the number of images you can generate to about two per day. If you plan to use it frequently, you may want to look into a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which is $20 a month. Alternatively, you could check out the free Bing image generator.

Digital Citizenship

For the students we work with, ChatGPT offers benefits as well as challenges. On one hand, it can be an excellent executive functioning support. Students could use it to create project timelines, break down complex assignments, and assist with task initiation.

However, we also need to ensure that our students know how to use ChatGPT safely, ethically, and responsibly, and this isn’t easy, especially for students who struggle with comprehension and critical thinking. I recommend being transparent with them about how you use ChatGPT in speech therapy sessions, as well as explicitly teaching digital citizenship skills like privacy, media literacy, and cyberbullying/cybercrime prevention.

Enjoy experimenting with ChatGPT, and please let me know if you have additional strategies and suggestions to share!

References and Resources:

If you love simple, effective digital materials that can be used with a variety of age groups, consider signing up for a Digital SLP membership! Click here to learn more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Cassity, M.S., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist in Florida. She is the founder of Digital SLP, which specializes in online speech therapy materials for busy SLPs. She also blogs and hosts a podcast, both of which can be found on The Digital SLP. In her spare time she enjoys yoga, cooking, the outdoors, and spending time with her children.