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A relative of mine recently died from bulbar ALS. By the time she had the diagnosis her voice had already changed and weakened significantly so she couldn't get

A relative of mine recently died from bulbar ALS. By the time she had the diagnosis her voice had already changed and weakened significantly so she couldn't get a decent recording to use with a text to speech synthesizer. Something like this could potentially help people like her or those who lose their voices in traumatic accidents. Even if you do have the time to do it, training a current TTS engine in your voice takes a significant amount of time and the results are often poor.

tgraham 4y ago
100%. The tech my father tried to use in the last year of his MND was so poor (effort to train it, reality of what it delivered- jilted voice). The impact on his quality of life - imagine not being able to communicate at all - would have been massive were it better.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  This makes me wonder whether we could create a standard monologue that someone could record, which provides a complete set of training data for that individual. Something about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog would be apropos here, but I suspect the length would be more Shakespearian than that simple typographic clever sentence. I expect it will be a while until we can fully utilize that data, but I have to imagine that something could be done today to preserve my voice (while I am still in my prime). Effectively, this would be a sort of vocal cryogenics, betting that we can do something today that will allow us to take advantage of future technology.
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    This is basically what you do currently for a TTS engine if you have ALS or similar. The search term you want is "voice banking". You are given a long list of words and sentences, often complex, to read out that have all the different sounds and then these are re combined by the software. The problem is that by the time you know you need this, you often already have speech problems and so making clear sounds is difficult. Also if you're like my relative who was trilingual you would need to do it in all three languages using the current system. She got a half way decent voice bank in her native tongue, but it was still noticeably slurred. She didn't even attempt it in her second and third tongues.
dividedbyzero 4y ago
> Even if you do have the time to do it, training a current TTS engine in your voice takes a significant amount of time and the results are often poor. I wonder what sort of recordings and other data you'd need to get this right assuming what TTS might look like in a few years' time
Mordisquitos 4y ago
Interestingly, the prime example of how much a person's attachment to their voice is part of their own personal identity also comes from ALS... but ironically in the opposite direction. I'm talking of course about Stephen Hawking, who famously rejected upgrading his voice synthesiser when technology improved [0]: Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesizer, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early '80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul." "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice. [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/ https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voi...
- IanCal 4y ago
  I disagree that's in the opposite direction. Hawking didn't want to change his voice - he'd had this for years at that point, and the option was also to just change to a different arbitrary voice rather than restoring what he had before. Something like this could let someone keep their "original" voice. Hawking may have preferred to have something that sounded like his voice before he lost it than a completely new voice.

tgraham 4y ago

100%. The tech my father tried to use in the last year of his MND was so poor (effort to train it, reality of what it delivered- jilted voice). The impact on his quality of life - imagine not being able to communicate at all - would have been massive were it better.

voakbasda 4y ago
This makes me wonder whether we could create a standard monologue that someone could record, which provides a complete set of training data for that individual. Something about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog would be apropos here, but I suspect the length would be more Shakespearian than that simple typographic clever sentence. I expect it will be a while until we can fully utilize that data, but I have to imagine that something could be done today to preserve my voice (while I am still in my prime). Effectively, this would be a sort of vocal cryogenics, betting that we can do something today that will allow us to take advantage of future technology.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  This is basically what you do currently for a TTS engine if you have ALS or similar. The search term you want is "voice banking". You are given a long list of words and sentences, often complex, to read out that have all the different sounds and then these are re combined by the software. The problem is that by the time you know you need this, you often already have speech problems and so making clear sounds is difficult. Also if you're like my relative who was trilingual you would need to do it in all three languages using the current system. She got a half way decent voice bank in her native tongue, but it was still noticeably slurred. She didn't even attempt it in her second and third tongues.

dividedbyzero 4y ago

> Even if you do have the time to do it, training a current TTS engine in your voice takes a significant amount of time and the results are often poor. I wonder what sort of recordings and other data you'd need to get this right assuming what TTS might look like in a few years' time

Mordisquitos 4y ago

Interestingly, the prime example of how much a person's attachment to their voice is part of their own personal identity also comes from ALS... but ironically in the opposite direction. I'm talking of course about Stephen Hawking, who famously rejected upgrading his voice synthesiser when technology improved [0]: Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesizer, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early '80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul." "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice. [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/ https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voi...

IanCal 4y ago
I disagree that's in the opposite direction. Hawking didn't want to change his voice - he'd had this for years at that point, and the option was also to just change to a different arbitrary voice rather than restoring what he had before. Something like this could let someone keep their "original" voice. Hawking may have preferred to have something that sounded like his voice before he lost it than a completely new voice.