The late Stephen Hawking, who suffered from and ultimately succumbed to ALS) made use of a robotic voice TTL to communicate, developed by Intel. Over the years, advances in linguistic understanding, greater processing power and the advent of machine learning have made voices sound human enough that they can be nearly indistinguishable from live speakers in many different languages, though the robotic voice is still a favorite. Initially, the voices generated were very robotic sounding, with neither inflection nor tonal variation.
Synthetic voice generation (also called text-to-speech, or TTS) has advanced dramatically since the technology first emerged in the 1980s. Sometimes this is due to the vocal tract itself, sometimes it is due to cognitive dysfunction, but it's always frustrating, especially because, without the ability to speak, many, many people become unable to function in our language-oriented society. Stroke victims make up a significant portion of this, but throat cancer survivors, people who are severely autistic, those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), accident victims, and those with congenital muteness are also unable to speak. Around the world, there are 500 million people who, for one reason or another, cannot speak, or cannot speak well. When this happens, the ability to speak ends. One of the most recognizable symbols of Covid-19 is the intubation tube - a tube that goes down the mouth or through a tracheotomy incision in order to supply air to the lungs from a ventilator. There are a huge number of uses for artificial intelligence and machine learning that are, frankly, a waste of computer cycles.Įvery so often, however, I come across efforts, almost invariably born from a passion and desire to make a difference rather than the imperative of making a profit, that helps to showcase the best of humanity and how this technology can improve lives.