Technology Gives Unique Voices to Those Who Can't Speak From: R&D Magazine - 07/15/2016 Speech synthesis technology has been around for decades, but as devices shrink in size, efforts to customize them are expanding. Multiple companies and research groups are using speech synthesis engines to create voices from spoken samples, usually thousands of recorded sentences. For example, CereProc, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, created a voice for the late film critic Roger Ebert several years before his death in 2013 by mining commentary tracks he'd recorded for movies. But VocaliD, a Belmont, Massachusetts, company, is taking a different approach by creating custom voices using just a small sample from the recipient, even if they can't speak. Starting with just a tiny snippet of someone's voice - a few seconds of saying "Ahhhh" - the company matches recipients with a "donor voice" - maybe a relative - and then blends the two together. The result is a sound file that can be plugged into any text-to-speech device. Read the entire article at; http://www.rdmag.com/news/2016/07/technology-gives-unique-voices-those-who-cant-speak Links: CereProc https://www.cereproc.com VocaliD https://www.vocalid.co