Dave K
Distinguished member
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2015
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- 196
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My PALS avoided the laborious task of voice banking for a long time. After her voice started to go away, she recorded a few hundred common phrases, which was helpful, but in hindsight, these recordings were rather wooden and usually revealed no more personality than the electronic voice of her eye-gaze computer.
But this is what really worked:
When my (limb onset) PALS was unable to dial a phone or send text messages, but still had a strong voice, she downloaded a program called VOXER on her smart phone. This program allows a user to send voice recordings over the text message network, and the result is kind of like talking on walkie-talkies. She used this for about two years to communicate with quite a few people.
But here was the unexpected benefit: After my PALS lost her voice and was using an eye-gaze computer to generate speech, I called the folks at Voxer, and they were able to restore every single voice message my PALS had ever recorded! So we had a HUGE collection of natural voice recordings of countless kinds of conversations. I asked a sound engineer friend to create .wav files of several dozen phrases found in the recordings, and with a little help from Tobii, my PALS could summon up her own voice by just gazing at a button on her computer screen. Lots of smiles all around.
So I can't say enough good things about Voxer.
But this is what really worked:
When my (limb onset) PALS was unable to dial a phone or send text messages, but still had a strong voice, she downloaded a program called VOXER on her smart phone. This program allows a user to send voice recordings over the text message network, and the result is kind of like talking on walkie-talkies. She used this for about two years to communicate with quite a few people.
But here was the unexpected benefit: After my PALS lost her voice and was using an eye-gaze computer to generate speech, I called the folks at Voxer, and they were able to restore every single voice message my PALS had ever recorded! So we had a HUGE collection of natural voice recordings of countless kinds of conversations. I asked a sound engineer friend to create .wav files of several dozen phrases found in the recordings, and with a little help from Tobii, my PALS could summon up her own voice by just gazing at a button on her computer screen. Lots of smiles all around.
So I can't say enough good things about Voxer.