At some point from the 90s to a young Sarah Ezekiel they recorded her with a video camera and kept that recording In a VHS tape. In that little Sarah appearance he only spoke eight seconds, but almost three decades later those eight seconds have ended up being an incredible gift.
One that He has returned his voice.
Sara Ezekiel lost her voice in 2000, before smartphones became massive and allowed us, among many other things, to capture video easily.
A motoneurone disease caused that both capacity and mobility in his hands lost just when he was going to have his second child, a child called Eric. As indicated in a BBC interview“I thought it would be fine, but after Eric was born, I quickly deteriorated.” In a few months he lost control of his hands, and shortly after he was incapable of any type of intelligible conversation.
His marriage ended shortly after, and Sarah, in the care of his two children, found himself in a terrible situation. Eric, now 25 years old, just remembers his mother being paralyzed. Aviva, her 28 -year -old daughter, remembers when she realized that her mother was different. “I have that memory of asking him to prepare some strawberries and see that he was not able to cut them. He had to ask someone.”
Five years after diagnosis, Sarah found A break Thanks to the Ocular monitoring technology. He could build words and phrases with the movement of the eyes, so that a voice synthesizer offered a synthetic voice similar to what for example I used Stephen Hawking.
That was the beginning of a new life that adapted with joy. He became a volunteer of the association to affected by his illness, and painted again thanks to that same technology. And a few years later a small milestone began to take shape.
The AI and the “miracle” of the cloning of the voice
A company called Smartbox He had announced what was going to provide cloned voices Free for a million people at risk of losing their voice or those who had already lost it for diseases such as cancer or motorcycle.
They asked Sarah a voice recording to rebuild her, but the only thing Sarah had was an old VHS tape in which they had recorded her daughter Aviva and in which she spoke just eight seconds.
That recording was a disaster. Image quality was bad, but In addition the sound was distortedwith people mixing when speaking and a television sound at full volume. Simon Poole, one of those responsible for Smartbox, thought it would not be possible.
However, Poole managed to isolate Sarah’s voice thanks to the Voice Isolator application of Elevenlabs, Specialized company in This type of solutions. The problem is that the result lacked intonation and personality, and also had a strange American accent. To try to solve it, he used another application trained with thousands of voices to fill holes of this type of recordings and that could help recover a voice like Sarah’s.
After achieving a result that he believed appropriate, he sent several phrases to Sarah with his cloned voice. He called and heard her how Sarah, hearing those phrases, almost broke out to cry. One of Sarah’s old friends, who met her before losing his voice, was “impressed by how realistic he sounded.”
His daughter Aviva said he was also impressed although he admitted that he had to get used to her. “Hearing her now daily still surprises me.” For Eric “it has made an incredible difference”, because that voice can also include an intonation that shows that your mother is cheerful or angry.
Sarah misses her authentic voice, but as she said, “I’m happy to be back. It’s better than being a robot“
Image | Gabriel Petry | Ursula Castillo
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