You've Heard of Prosthetic Limbs, But What About Prosthetic Voices?

pcmag.com:

Donating parts of ourselves isn't a new concept. Thanks to advances in modern medicine, we can give blood, plasma, bone marrow, and even organs to those in need. But now, with the help of a pair of headphones and your computer, you can give someone the gift of a new voice.

Voice AI company VocaliD(Opens in a new window) believes the voice is a key aspect of human identity. To that end, it creates AI voices for commercial use by brands as well as custom prosthetic voices for those in need of speech-assistive technology. The voices aren't the run-of-the-mill, generic sounding ones found in speech synthesizers like that of the late, great Stephen Hawking. Instead, VocaliD’s prosthetics are crafted from a blend of the client’s own vocalizations and crowdsourced human voices donated to its Human Voicebank(Opens in a new window).

We sat down with Dr. Rupal Patel, founder and CEO, to learn more about her organization, the logistics behind voice donation and creation, and how people can help give voices to those in need. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PCMag: Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us today! To dive right in, can you walk me through the process of voice creation?Dr. Patel: Sure! So, there are two things with that. A bespoke voice is when we combine two people's voices together, because someone has very limited speech. You have the voice donor, and then the person that can’t speak, and you mix the two together. When making a bespoke voice, we look at demographic features like age, gender, and accent in order to match the donor to the recipient, and go from there.

Preferences also play a really important role. So in the beginning, we were really trying to get it more accurate like, oh,