UPDATED 3/2 at 3:45 p.m. with link to video at Gizmodo
Here’s a heartening use of technology. After a series of surgeries brought on by a bout with cancer, movie critic Roger Ebert lost his ability to speak. He had taken to using post-it notes, note pads and even a MacBook with the built-in (and passable) voice reading software to help communicate. (This, of course, hasn’t stopped him from remaining a strong movie critic; his ability to write hasn’t diminished in any way from his health concerns, other than keeping him out of the screening room when health issues arose.)
But Ebert reached out to a company that can take samples of a person’s voice and create text-to-speech software that uses the person’s actual voice. For Ebert, he had crystal-clear voice samples from DVD commentaries, and some voice recordings from all the years of television he did. The end result is an improvement over the generic voices, and something that both Ebert and the company are looking at how to improve. The technology was showcased on Tuesday’s Oprah Winfrey show.
Ebert seems enthusiastic about the technology, even if there were kinks to work out, but it shows that technology is improving to the point where soon, as long as the appropriate recordings are done, people’s voices may very well live on.
Majel Barrett, the voice of the computer in all the various Star Trek productions and Gene Roddenberry’s wife, passed away recently, but given the database of recordings they have of her, that’d be a fun project for them to take on, especially given the scenario of using a computer to recreate a woman’s voice, who in turn was pretending to be a computer.
Check out demos of the voice technology at CereProc’s Web site. UPDATE: See a video of Ebert using the computer voice from the Oprah Winfrey show on Gizmodo.
SOURCES: Roger Ebert and CereProc via CNET, Esquire and Gizmodo
