AI Voice Cloning Restores Speech for Those with Motor Neuron Diseases

The Download: AI-restored voices, and bot relationships

Motor neuron diseases took their voices. AI is bringing them back. Jules Rodriguez lost his voice in October of last year. His speech had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2020, but a tracheostomy to help him breathe dealt the final blow. Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Fernandez, who live in Miami, thought they would never hear his voice again. Then they re-created it using AI. After feeding old recordings of Rodriguez's voice into a tool trained on voices from film, television, radio, and podcasts, the couple were able to generate a voice clone -- a way for Jules to communicate in his "old voice." Rodriguez is one of over a thousand people with speech difficulties who have cloned their voices using free software from ElevenLabs. The AI voice clones aren't perfect. But they represent a vast improvement on previous communication technologies and are already improving the lives of people with motor neuron diseases. Read the full story. AI is everywhere, and it's starting to alter our relationships in new and unexpected ways -- relationships with our spouses, kids, colleagues, friends, and even ourselves. Although the technology remains unpredictable and sometimes baffling, individuals from all across the world and from all walks of life are finding it useful, supportive, and comforting, too. People are using large language models to seek validation, mediate marital arguments, and help navigate interactions with their community. They're using it for support in parenting, for self-care, and even to fall in love. In the coming decades, many more humans will join them. And this is only the beginning. What happens next is up to us. Read the full story.

Motor neuron diseases took their voices. AI is bringing them back.

"A tracheostomy is a scary endeavor for people living with ALS, because it signifies crossing a new stage in life, a stage that is close to the end," Rodriguez tells me using a communication device. "Before the procedure I still had some independence, and I could still speak somewhat, but now I am permanently connected to a machine that breathes for me." Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Fernandez, who live in Miami, thought they would never hear his voice again. Then they re-created it using AI. After feeding old recordings of Rodriguez's voice into a tool trained on voices from film, television, radio, and podcasts, the couple were able to generate a voice clone -- a way for Jules to communicate in his "old voice." "Hearing my voice again, after I hadn't heard it for some time, lifted my spirits," says Rodriguez, who today communicates by typing sentences using a device that tracks his eye movements, which can then be "spoken" in the cloned voice. The clone has enhanced his ability to interact and connect with other people, he says. He has even used it to perform comedy sets on stage. Rodriguez is one of over a thousand people with speech difficulties who have used the voice cloning tool since ElevenLabs, the company that developed it, made it available to them for free. Like many new technologies, the AI voice clones aren't perfect, and some people find them impractical in day-to-day life. But the voices represent a vast improvement on previous communication technologies and are already improving the lives of people with motor neuron diseases, says Richard Cave, a speech and language therapist at the Motor Neuron Disease Association in the UK. "This is genuinely AI for good," he says. Motor neuron diseases are a group of disorders in which the neurons that control muscles and movement are progressively destroyed. They can be difficult to diagnose, but typically, people with these disorders start to lose the ability to move various muscles. Eventually, they can struggle to breathe, too. There is no cure. Rodriguez started showing symptoms of ALS in the summer of 2019. "He started losing some strength in his left shoulder," says Fernandez, who sat next to him during our video call. "We thought it was just an old sports injury." His arm started to get thinner, too. In November, his right thumb "stopped working" while he was playing video games. It wasn't until February 2020, when Rodriguez saw a hand specialist, that he was told he might have ALS. He was 35 years old. "It was really, really, shocking to hear from somebody ... you see about your hand," says Fernandez. "That was a really big blow." Like others with ALS, Rodriguez was advised to "bank" his voice -- to tape recordings of himself saying hundreds of phrases. These recordings can be used to create a "banked voice" to use in communication devices. The result was jerky and robotic.