Voice Donors For People Who Can’t Speak!

•   An iPhone app will let anyone donate their voice to be cut up and customized into synthetic speech for someone who needs a similar voice
•  Vocal Id wants to use speech recordings to create personalized synthetic voices for those who are unable to speak on their own. One day, my voice may be cut up and customized for a person who needs a voice that sounds a bit like mine.

•  There are millions of people with severe speech impediments because of a stroke.
•  who uses an early synthesizer called DEC talk.
•  These utterances provide clues to what that person’s speech might sound like – whether it’s high-pitched, raspy or breathy.
•  A surrogate who is similar in age and the same sex is selected to donate their voice.

•  Then, using a software tool called Model Talker, the surrogate’s voice is blended with the patient’s and stripped down into the tiny units that make up speech. Even a single vowel sound might be broken into two or three parts that can then be assembled into new words. “You probably wouldn’t recognize it as having come from the donor any more,”

•  ”Those attributes of your speech tell the listener whether you are familiar or unfamiliar, male or female, from New England, New York City or the South. It tells you about the emotional and mental space of a talker,