Communications of the ACM
Patients Were Told Their Voices Could Disappear. They Turned to AI to Save them.
Ron Brady, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis three years ago, uses a keyboard to type what he wants his synthetic voice to say.
Credit: Alexa Juliana Ard/The Washington Post
Ron Brady was 52 years old when he was diagnosed with ALS, which stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that eventually causes most people to lose their ability to speak, walk or breathe.
Now, at 55, he can't swallow food, and it's getting harder to brush his teeth and put on clothes. He likes to crack jokes, but his speech is slurred to the point where few understand him.
But he has not lost his voice.
That's because he preserved his voice with a company called Voice Keeper, which is one of several companies using artificial intelligence to "bank" people's voices while they are still able to speak and re-creates those voices for text-to-speech software.
From The Washington Post
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