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Rupal Patel
Associate professor of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology

Rupal Patel in the Press

Nature News

AI listens for health conditions

Voice is an acoustic instrument that’s very sensitive to physiological changes in the body, says Rupal Patel, a speech and language pathologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Google’s new AI can hear a snippet of song—and then keep on playing

Rupal Patel, who researches information and speech science at Northeastern University, says that previous work using AI to generate audio could capture those nuances only if they were explicitly annotated in training data. In contrast, AudioLM learns those characteristics from the input data automatically, which adds to the realistic effect.
Popular Mechanics

Alexa Can Speak in Your Dead Grandmother’s Voice

“Imagine what would happen if we took Ali’s voice right now, with all the stuff that’s going on with Salman Rushdie, and put words into his mouth—words he would never utter?” asks Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and vice president of voice and accessibility at Veritone, an AI tech […]
Popular Mechanics

lexa Can Speak in Your Dead Grandmother’s Voice, And That’s Probably Not a Good Thing

“Imagine what would happen if we took Ali’s voice right now, with all the stuff that’s going on with Salman Rushdie, and put words into his mouth—words he would never utter?” asks Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and vice president of voice and accessibility at Veritone, an AI tech […]
The NPR Logo

New Selena album ‘Moonchild Mixes’ sparks voice-aging debate

Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University, said although some fans may be uncomfortable, the producers of Moonchild Mixes haven’t created a whole new synthetic voice or voice clone for Selena. They’ve just tweaked her original tracks. 
Marketplace

More brands want unique synthetic voices. How do the actors providing them maintain control?

Standing got connected to a startup called VocalID. It’s a kind of marketplace for voice talent that lets an actor give the OK before their voice can be used in a particular project. It’s run by Rupal Patel, a professor of communications sciences at Northeastern University.
Slate

Spectacular Vernacular

They also interview Rupal Patel, professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Computer Science at Northeastern University and the founder of VocaliD. 
Associated Press Logo

Why the Anthony Bourdain voice cloning creeps people out

Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own synthetic speech, though getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdain’s voice probably took a lot more training, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University who runs another voice-generating company, VocaliD, that focuses […]
BBC Logo

Voice cloning of growing interest to actors and cybercriminals

VocaliD was founded by its chief executive Rupal Patel, who is also a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northeastern University. Prof Patel set up the business in 2014 as an extension of her clinical work creating artificial voices for patients who are unable to talk without assistance, such as people who have lost […]
Scientific American

Artificial Intelligence Is Now Shockingly Good At Sounding Human

Rupal Patel heads a research group at Northeastern University that studies speech prosody—the changes in pitch, loudness and duration that we use to convey intent and emotion through voice. “Sometimes people think of it as the icing on the cake,” she explains. “You have the message, and now it’s how you modulate that message, but I really […]

Rupal Patel for Northeastern Global News