The prosthetic voice When Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw—and, thus, his voice—to cancer, the text-to-speech company CereProc created a synthetic voice that would be custom-made for the film critic. The computerized voice, a fusion of the words Ebert had recorded in his long career, would not sound fully natural; it would, however, sound distinctive. It was meant […]
A New Kind Of Voice Prosthetic Will Eliminate Generic Robo-Voices Physicist Stephen Hawking has long dealt with a degenerative disease that leaves him unable to speak. Instead, he uses a speech synthesizer that bellows out his words in a now-recognizable robotic male voice. It works for Hawking–he’s an adult male. But similar robotic voices are used for little girls and all the other 2.5 million […]
All Things Digital Putting the Self in Self-Expression: Rupal Patel Creates Personalized Prosthetic Voices There are 2.5 million people in the U.S. with severe speech disorders, and some 40 percent of them use speech devices to express themselves. But those devices offer an extremely limited selection of computerized voices. “We wouldn’t dream of fitting a little girl with the limb of a grown man — so, why then, a […]