I am sure everyone has heard about ChatGPT, an AI program that writes things for you based on specific prompts. It has become very popular recently. Last year, I used ChatGPT to create a poem for fun. Lately, however, I learned about a different and interesting way people are using AI to change their lives for the better.

ALS is a disease that causes most people to lose their ability to speak, walk, or breathe. About 5,000 people are diagnosed with ALS each year in the United States. There are many companies that are working to recreate human voices to help people with ALS speak. Before losing the ability to speak, people suffering from ALS bank their voice by recording different words. Later, when needed, they type in what they want to say, and a computer program says it for them in their voice.

Unfortunately, this process is expensive and time consuming. However, with AI, it has become much more accessible. The AI captures someone’s voice by catching the individual sounds of consonants and vowels called “phonemes.” It also captures the transitions between the phonemes, called “diphones.” After capturing these sounds, the AI switches them up however needed so that it can recreate someone’s voice. Where before, people had to record hundreds of different individual words, they now only need to record a few sounds and the AI can make the words for them. Getting their voices back gives people with ALS more confidence and connects them to the world. In one example, a relative of someone suffering from ALS said when they heard someone’s AI recorded voice “It felt like a part of [them] had come back.”

I think that this technology is quite interesting. Although it currently has a few pronunciation problems and it shows no emotions, it will get better over time. As it gets better it will also get cheaper, but this may allow for scamming. A scammer could impersonate someone using an AI voice, call their relatives, pretend to be them, and ask for money. The relatives might not be able to tell the difference.

For this reason, I would not record my voice for fun because it could be used against me or my family. However, if I had ALS or something that would disable my speaking, I would recreate my voice. I cannot even imagine losing my voice. The AI created voice is not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

Title of Article: Patients were told their voices could disappear. They turned to AI to save them.

Authors of Article: Amanda Morris, Alexa Juliana Ard and Szu Yu Chen

URL of article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2023/voice-banking-artificial-intelligence/