An Idea Regards Voice Loss

[voice]

Hi there,

I'm working on a research project that's looking into a faster way of taking a person's voice and using it for voice synthesis (text to speech). At the moment this is an incredibly lengthy and expensive process. My idea is to use a community to spilt a users voice into its individual sounds so that new sentences could be formed in that person's voice.

For example, say I'm in the early stages of a degenerative disease, I could read a thousand or so phrases, these phrases would be distributed among the community to be split into individual words and then melded together to create a synthetic version on the user's voice. This would mean that when the time does come for the users voice to stop working they could still communicate in their voice rather than a new voice. (The quality would probably depend on how many phrases are recorded)

If this would be of benefit to a large number of people I will pursue making it in the near future.

What do you think?

Is this needed?

Would you like to hear your voice when you can no longer use it?

Thanks for your feedback,
All the Best.

 

[BrianD]

I think you have just described what the existing project Modeltalker does, or very similar. There have been a few of us that created voices that way. Do a forum search on and you should find some threads with results even.

 

[voice]

I think you have just described what the existing project Modeltalker does, or very similar. There have been a few of us that created voices that way. Do a forum search on and you should find some threads with results even.

Ah yes, I've seen this before. How long does it take to actually get your voice done using this?

Thanks for the reply!

 

[BrianD]

Maybe 20 hours to record the 1600 phrases (I don't really remember, as I did it over 10 or so days). About 4 days for them to get the voice to me.

 

[FSHolbrook]

Voice banking is the solution. Folk need to plan ahead and set up a voice bank. It will save time and money in the future.

Rick

 

[Nikki J]

Rick I understand why people want to speak with their own voice. Why does it save time and money over using one of the " ready made" choices? I have been thinking about voice banking but not sure I care about sounding like me