Find out how AI can help people who have lost their voice: 'I stayed the same' says carrier of degenerative disease

Learn how AI can help people who are losing their voice

Paul McCartney announced this week that he will be releasing an unreleased Beatles song.

John Lennon’s voice will be incorporated into the recording with a little help from AI! Technology has also been a breath of fresh air for people with aphasia.

Ana Paula lives in San Francisco, United States. In 2021, she begins experiencing the first symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that affects movement and speech.

“It is a disease that you are alive, your mind is working, your spirit is working, but your body is down, out. […] I think the sound will be something that will pass faster because I feel it gets worse faster than other things,” says Ana Paula.

One of the first medical tips was to record your voice with the help of artificial intelligence. So, when she can’t speak, you can communicate using a computer or mobile phone – which will reproduce her voice.

the operation

The process of archiving audio into an AI database is very simple, it takes about an hour. First, the person records 50 phrases pre-selected by the company. Then you can register some additional items that cannot be missing from the database.

Ana Paula narrates her chosen phrases:

“I love you” and “Good morning, daylight, my happiness.”

Phrases that will make a big difference in the life of her family.

“It will be one of the things that will stay with us and help us be like, ‘My mom who’s still here with me, who calls me flower today, she’s my mom here,'” reports daughter, Isadora.

“It was the same!”

Ana Paula really wanted to have a voice in Portuguese. output from amazing He finally made her use a tool that also had the option to record her voice in the native language. For the first time, she hears how her voice sounds with artificial intelligence.

This was the first sentence she chose to hear in a synthetic voice:

“I thank everyone involved for being able to give me a vote in Portuguese”says the voice produced by the artificial intelligence.

“It was exactly the same! It’s a way to give dignity to the person with this disease because we lose so much and when you can speak your own language it’s amazing, it’s a blessing,” confirms Ana Paula.

To produce the audio in Portuguese, Ana supplied the system with the audio messages she had memorized before the illness.

Previously, artificial sound was based on putting together small fragments of words. Therefore, a person had to record thousands of phrases. Now the AI learns your accent, tone and the way you speak with just 100 sentences,” says the head of the company that made Anna’s voice.

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