A software company has brought a radio journalist鈥檚 lost voice back to the air with the power of neural networks.
American journalist Jamie Dupree suddenly lost his voice to a rare聽neurological condition in 2016.
The messages from his brain no longer reached his tongue, 聽a condition so rare that there are currently聽no specialists to treat the condition.
Whilst searching for a cure the journalist, who covers American congress, has used a pen to suppress his tongue and聽turned to social media and written stories to make his voice heard.
Now聽artificial intelligence聽and neural networks have brought his voice back to life.
Cereproc, founded in 2005,聽 reads out text with a human-sounding voice.
The technology is used by people who suffer from a range of speech conditions, but until recently users would have had to choose from one of the pre-created voices.
By harnessing neural networks, Cereproc鈥檚 software can now聽analyse the features of voice recordings to recreate it in the software.
The聽AI was given hours of聽Dupree鈥檚 previous work to analyse. In his latest blog, Dupree uploaded a demonstration of the results:
“AI techniques work quite well on small constrained problems, and learning to model speech is something deep neural nets can do really well,” Chris Pidcock, CereProc’s chief technical officer and co-founder, told the BBC.
Whilst the radio journalist continues the search for a cure, he plans to incorporate the technology into his broadcasts in the coming weeks.
鈥淵es, it will probably sound robotic to some of my listeners; but for the first time in two years, I will be back on the radio,鈥� Dupree said in a blog.
鈥淛amie Dupree 2.0 is here 鈥� and I couldn鈥檛 be more excited about it!鈥�