If you lose your voice, how can you speak?

In the first part of this talk, I’ll give an easy-to-understand, non-technical overview of the SpeakUnique project, in which we are providing personalised speech communication aids to people who are losing their own voice due to Motor Neurone Disease or other progressive conditions. We are currently conducting trials, to measure the improvement to quality-of-life that these communication aids give. The second part of the talk will get a little more technical, where I will describe how the technology works. Using powerful statistical models, and a large database of donated speech from thousands of people, we create accent- and gender-specific “Average Voice Models”. These are then further modified to produce speech that sounds like a particular person. A unique capability of our approach is that it only needs a small sample of that person’s speech and this sample may be disordered: the person is already becoming hard to understand. We are able to “repair” the voice by interchanging or interpolating parts of the Average Voice Model into a model learned from the person’s own speech. This results in a computer-generated voice that sounds like a normal, intelligible version of the person. This is finally installed on a mobile device, such as an iPad, for the person to use in daily life.