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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Last week on BBC Radio 4 I heard of a woman who was losing her voice through disease (MND maybe?), a similar system was being anticipated and she was saving voice samples to seed it with.

She had been a singer and strongly identified her self with her voice, she wanted to be able to use a speech synthesis system that had her own voice pattern.

Apologies if this was already mentioned, but it seems to be a use others here hadn't considered.

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Was this maybe CereProc? That's who helped Roger Ebert post thyroid cancer. He was a great candidate for the service as there were of course hours and hours of high quality audio recordings of his voice to use as a source.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/roger-eberts-voice-restored...

I was just thinking that Stephen Hawking would perhaps be interested in using this to replace his current voice synthesizer (feeding in old interviews of him when he could talk). He has said that he has adopted the current voice since he has associated it with his own, but I wonder if he would prefer his old actual voice.

I think Hawking is now so firmly tied to that voice that he would probably never switch for public speaking engagements and the like.

I could see him doing such a switch for personal interactions.

Indeed, he doesn't like other voices and has always fallen back to using the same voice:

> "The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986," he said. "I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it."

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-06-15-hawkin...

I recall his biggest qualm with his current synthesized voice is that it did not come with a British accent. :-)

I'm not sure how sentimental he is but he does seem quite tied to that voice since there have been lots of advancements in voice synthesis since he originally got this and yet he's chosen to keep this one.

I wonder if he'd accept the same voice, but with a different accent?

Should be just as possible in the present or near future.

Actually fantastic to see there are legitimate uses for this tech beyond the obvious

This is actually quite inspiring!

If it seemed to you to be a use others hadn't considered, why would you apologize for mentioning it?

I hate it when threads are full of the same comment, I didn't diligently search to check it hadn't been mentioned already; ergo preemptive apology.

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