New voice joy for dad Jason
Yorkshire accent for patient
A 41-year-old father with motor neurone disease will be able to keep his Yorkshire accent despite the fact he is losing the ability to speak. Experts have, for the first time, been able to use technology to create an accented voice, basing it on a similar system to that used by Professor Stephen Hawking.
Jason Liversidge, a former resident of Scarborough, was diagnosed in 2014 and is slowly losing the ability to speak as his condition progresses. But instead of giving him a computer-generated voice, specialists have created a voice with a Yorkshire accent for him.
They have used recordings of his original voice from a speech he gave at his sister’s wedding, plus those of Yorkshire men who have donated their voices. Donor voices were needed because Mr Liversidge’s speech is already slurred.
Speaking to BBC Inside Out Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, Mr Liversidge said he was hoping to keep his voice to communicate with his children, Poppy and Lilly, and wife, Liz. He said: “I’d quite like to keep a form of identity. I just don’t want to be a programmed voice on a computer. But also for the kids and Liz, [I want them] to hear my voice rather [than] a computer one.”
After hearing his new voice, he said: “That’s pretty good. It’s instantly recognisable. It sounds really good. I know it’s me.”
Dr Phillipa Rewaj, a speech and language therapist at the Anne Rowling Clinic in Edinburgh, said: “Your voice is identifiable to others as your face is. It’s very unique to you. So to be able to preserve that is really important for people.”