Learn how artificial intelligence can help people who are losing their voice
This week Paul McCartney announced that he will be releasing an unreleased Beatles song.
John Lennon’s voice is integrated into the recording with a little help from artificial intelligence! And technology has also brought a breath of fresh air to people who are losing their language skills.
Anna Paula lives in San Francisco, United States. In 2021, she experienced the first symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that affects movement and speech.
“It’s a disease that you’re alive, your mind is working, your soul is working, but your body is going downhill, it’s running out. […] I think the voice will be something that will end much quicker because I feel like the rate at which it goes bad is faster than the other things,” says Anna Paula.
One of the first pieces of medical advice was to use artificial intelligence to record your own voice. So if you can no longer speak, you can communicate through a computer or mobile phone that reproduces your voice.
The process
The process of archiving the voice in an artificial intelligence database is very simple and takes about an hour. First, the person records 50 sentences given by the company. Then you can enter some additional ones that cannot be missing in the database.
Anna Paula tells which sentences she chose:
“I love you” and “Good morning, daylight, my source of joy”.
Sentences that will make all the difference in the life of her family.
“It’s going to be one of those things that will stick in our minds and help us say, ‘It’s my mom who’s still here with me calling me the flower of the day, it’s my mom that’s here is’”, reports the daughter Isadora.
“It was the same!”
Anna Paula really wanted to have a voice in Portuguese. With the production of Fantástico she finally used a tool that also offers the possibility to record her voice in her mother tongue. For the first time, she uses artificial intelligence to hear what her voice looks like.
That was the first sentence she wanted to hear with the synthetic voice:
“Thank you to everyone involved for giving me a voice in Portuguese.”says the voice generated by artificial intelligence.
“It’s exactly the same! It’s a way of giving dignity to the person who has this disease because we lose so much and being able to speak in your own language is wonderful, it’s a blessing,” Anna Paula emphasizes.
To generate the voice in Portuguese, Anna provided the system with voice messages she had saved before she became ill.
Synthetic voice used to be based on putting together small parts of words. So the person had to record thousands of sentences. Now the artificial intelligence learns your accent, tone and way of speaking in just 100 sentences,” says the president of the company that developed Anna’s voice.
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