Creating ‘human voicebank’ to aid the speech-impaired

RYAN. Alex. Siri. These are names of robotic voices that are often programmed on electronic tablets. They also become default identities for people with speech disorders who rely on technology to communicate.

Now some speech scientists are developing customised voices to reflect the broader diversity of the people who use them. To do it, they are tapping into a vast network of volunteers who are donating their voices to share with people who cannot speak.

The effort to build an international “Human Voicebank” has attracted more than 17,000 volunteers from 110 countries, including Priyanka Pandya, a 16-year old from Columbia, Maryland, who plans to spend her winter vacation recording a string of sentences into her laptop.

“To be able to give somebody the gift of voice,” said the junior at Glenelg Country School. “I think that’s really, really powerful,” she said.

Her voice could be used to help one of more than two million Americans who have severe speech disorders and need help to communicate, a dilemma captured in the acclaimed new television series “Speechless,” whose main character, a teenager with cerebral palsy, relies on technology and a personal aide to act as his “voice” at school.

“Everyone has a voice,” said Rupal Patel, founder of VocaliD, the Belmont-Massachusetts-based start-up that launched the voice bank. “Even people who are speechless have sounds that are unique to them.”

Her company designs personalised synthetic voices by recording the unique, if limited, sounds of the user, and then blending them with a larger sample - usually six to ten hours of recordings - from a voice donor, matched by age, gender and region.

The company is developing voices now for its first 100 customers. But researchers have been honing the technology for many years.

Tim Bunnell, head of the Speech Research Laboratory at the Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, has engineered voices for more than 1,000 people with degenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Those people were usually able to record their own voices before they lost the ability to talk. He said it’s much more challenging to extrapolate what a voice should sound like for someone who can only make a few vowel sounds.

The scientists in Bunnell’s lab take the sounds and analyse them for vocal qualities, such as pitch and timbre, and record them as a batch of numbers. Then they map out the recordings from a voice donor. They merge the voices by modifying the donor voice to reflect the qualities of the user’s voice.

Bunnell said, in particular, they work to match the “vowel quality” because the “colour” of someone’s voice is primarily conveyed through the vowels. It’s a process of tweaking the numbers and trial and error. — Washington Post

To be able to give somebody the gift of voice. I think that’s really, really powerful. – Priyanka Pandya,volunteer who “donated” her voice

John Gregoire of Windham, Maine, received a customised synthetic voice in December 2015. He and his wife, Linda Gregoire, “reacted simultaneously” when they heard it for the first time, as seen here, she said. “It was him,” she said. He received the...