The woman who saved Stephen Hawking's voice and gave the tech to those in need
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It's interesting to note that until 2001, the "Paul" voice was used by NOAA to broadcast weather alerts to automatic weather radios. It's also interesting to note that the voice itself was a series of samples recorded by Dennis Klatt, a researcher who dedicated his career to helping the disabled speak again and passed away shortly after the DECtalk was released. That Hawking was able to adopt it as his own, is a rather sweet tale with a cyberpunk twist.
You can compare the DECtalk "Paul" voice with Klatt's own voice here: http://www.festvox.org/history/klatt.html
They indeed were looking for the masters [1].
When they found it they made a replacement for the voice synth on software running in a raspberry pi. They had just replaced the the old voice synth back in Jan. [2]
Additionally, Dennis Klatt was the inventor of DECTalk, the three original voices were his own for the male voice, his wife voice for the female voice and his daughter voice for a child voice, they were named Perfect Paul, that was the default voice, Beautiful Betty and Kit the Kid.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voi...
Don't forget the whispering Wendy. Who was that?
[1] I can't find a link for the life of me, but I think I saw it on BBC's Horizon programme where a person wears a camera helmet which is showing a different person's perspective which includes the wearer as a "third person". In a few minutes the wearer starts to feel dissociated from their own body and starts to feel associated with the "viewer". It's a really weird and interesting experiment. Hopefully, this'll spark a memory and someone can find a video.
EDIT: Ah, here we are. I think this is the one I was remembering: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t0xw (alas its "not available in [my] location", so...)
(I do seem to remember seeing an even earlier version of this experiment on this very programme, Horizon, but that may be a false memory.)
Years ago, a friend of mine's mother-in-law lost her voice due to cancer. As an engineer, he built her a tool from a toy Casio keyboard and some samples, allowing her to talk using this portable toy.
After that experience, he talked about wanting to create a service by with which people could archive their voices, so that in case of future need they could be loaded as samples for such a device. He'd give them scripts to read and record, from which he'd parse the phoneme samples, and then storing them in a repository that they could later retrieve if necessary.
Today there's probably a need for a lot more security than he'd talked about at the time, but it seems like something that's eminently do-able today. It could be a very cheap and low-cost endeavor, but useful as a sort of insurance because it carries a really high value in the unusual cases where it's needed.
I believe there's also another service I'm forgetting the name of right now.
Hawking could only communicate at about 10 words a minute. There has been some work to improve this technology with predictive type, for example.
https://iq.intel.com/behind-scenes-intel-keeps-stephen-hawki...
Was curious if the technology has improved much? Eye tracking, gesturing, etc
https://www.quora.com/Speeches-For-the-average-person-speaki...
demo of acat operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hodYN6Ngk_E
project source: https://01.org/acat
They (Intel?) replaced the hardware and software with a better system, called Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT). It allowed him to use computer easily (compared to the old system) [0]:
The new Intel user interface operates like an engine. A sensor mounted on Hawking's cheek is detected by an infrared switch attached to his glasses, helping Hawking select a character on his computer. A customized version of the popular SwiftKey app has greatly improved the system's ability to predict his next characters, words and actions so he only has to type the first few characters of a word. That information is relayed to his speech synthesizer.
To search the Web, for example, Hawking previously had to take lengthy routes: Exit from a communication window, navigate a mouse to run the browser, navigate the mouse again to the search bar, and finally type the search text. The new system automates all of these steps seamlessly and quickly.
[0] : https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/02/intel-hawking...
They eventually found the master from his voice and developed a new synth in software that run in a raspberry pi that he was using since jan 2018.
the only thing they kept was the voice synth, everything else was replaced. What was developed by intel and made open source was the software he use to interact with the computer named acat [1]