A lot of people are organ donors, but what you may not know is that you don’t have to be dead to donate a piece of yourself. A new company, VocaliD, allows people to donate their voices to those without them. The company allows people to record themselves to contribute to a database of voices for those who have lost their voices to things like stroke, Parkinson’s or cerebral palsy. The premise is to create a database of human voices and a personalized synthetic voice out of those recordings. Once a surrogate who is similar in age and the same sex is selected to donate their voice, that person reads through several thousand sample sentences, sourced from classic books like White Fang, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Velveteen Rabbit. Then, using a software tool called ModelTalker, the surrogate's voice is blended with the patient's and stripped down into the tiny units that make up speech. Even a single vowel sound might be broken into two or three parts that can then be assembled into new words. Right now, it takes a long time to give your voice. Donors have to read at least 800 sentences to create a usable voice and 3,000 for a natural one. However, if people all over the world commit to donating, VocaliD could build a bank that will allow people with all kinds of accents and histories to find a voice that feels like their own.
