This Quebec man is losing his voice. An AI tool is helping to bring it back to life
Tilt in a small microphone at Cubek City Studios, Dr. Alek Cooper takes a breath and often reads to having “to be” to be “to be” from Shakespeare. Small village,
“It’s very dramatic,” Cooper said, away from the microphone and let a laughter out.
“I just realized, my God, it’s really talking about death.”
This is a topic Cooper says that he has been forced to think in the last one and a half years, when he was detected ALS, a terminal motor neuron disease. He was initially given an average life expectancy of two to five years.
Originally a doctor of Victoria’s family had 1,800 patients before announcing his SNAP retirement.
While busy renovating his home to become wheelchair accessible, Cooper is also spending more time in front of a microphone – common things, detailed poems and their favorite book passage as part of this process, when the disease progresses.
He is using AI-operated voice technology by Elevenlabs-a US-based company that is offering technology to a million people who are suffering from degenerative diseases including ALS, Mouth Cancer, stroke victims or people with Parkinson’s disease.
The AI tool allows users to input small amounts of audio that generates a voice clone with a person’s natural tone and divine when they need to rely on text-to-spicich devices. Cooper started feeding himself to Ilvanlabs Bank at home and is getting help from professionals at the local rehabilitation center.
“When the voice goes, it goes away forever,” Cooper said.
“Thanks to this technique, the disease cannot overcome my voice.”
‘Facing it with tremendous courage’
Compared to most people who diagnosed ALS, Cooper says that he is considered “slow progress” and he looks “very bloody”.
Nevertheless, the symptoms of the disease are crawling. He says that he has started having trouble dressing, button and handling the pot.
His friend, Dr. Jean-Pire Canuel, who was diagnosed with ALS 11 years ago, is ahead.
A retired doctor, Canuel, still using his lawn grass cutting machine, runs a customized van and is dedicated to his hobby of making wooden charcoti boards.
Sitting in his motorized wheelchair, he smiles while swipe through his grandson’s pictures. It makes a lot of efforts to speak, but Canuel tells the CBC that before her diagnosis, “I was a strong person.”
He did not have the opportunity to record his voice, before his speech was severely affected by the disease. Canuel shed tears, as Cooper greeted him in the recording area in Quebec City, an humid morning in late June.
Cooper said, “This took away his voice, which happens to all of us.”
“He is facing it with tremendous courage.”
This is an approach that the cooper is trying to adopt, he says, it is possible to take all advice and inspiration from Canuel.
He said, “I will get an exhibition again, but Jean-Pierre is an incredibly courageous person. This is the way I want to be,” he said, by breaking down.
“You have to hug it and don’t deny it.”
Improve the quality of life
The head of the ALS Center of Excellence at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Angela Genge says, AI Voice Cloning is relatively new. She says that for the last decade, it was not widely available to patients.
But multi -vexic clinics can now offer a relatively voice banking to patients in their diagnosis, she says.
A professor at the University of McGill, “It makes a big difference for them.” “I help AI with the quality of life and I think it’s quite important.”
She says that she is used to listening to computer-related voices that want to say to patients. Prior to the “Computer Age”, she says that the patients were limited to talking using the indicating card.
Now, when the disease proceeds at the point of affecting the speech, a patient can be equipped with devices that can prepare words and sentences in their voice, Sophie DuPont, calls a speech language pathologist for the local health authority. Institute de Redptation N Defikens Physic de Cubek.
,When we are talking about the text, you are really going to type the first (on a tablet) if you are still capable, “he said.
The tool can also be adjusted to use through eye control or head tracking, a lot of famous physicist Stephen Hawking, like the speech-generating device used by Stephen Hawking, says DuPont.
Usually, when the patients come to his office, their ability to speak is already impaired, she says. In these cases, she depends on recording or sound mail to give strength to AI voice.
After working with Cooper for the last six months, DuPont says that the AI tool is used on an extraordinary basis. She says that she has to balance the urgency of the needs of patients with current resources.
‘This is going to be a legacy’
Traditionally, the sound of a robot available to ALS patients did not come in all sizes and sizes, called Dustin Blanc located in Los Angeles, who lead the partnership in the Ilenelab.
“Now every dialect, every language … it sounds like itself,” he said.
“This is how they used to speak in the same rhythm, in the same spirit. And it is super powerful.”
He says that the company’s influence program is hoping to find ways to bring its voice technology into the hands of those who need the most.
With concerns about AI’s power and safety, they say that the company understands that voice, and the process of cloning them, “are powerful things.”
They say that the company takes the safety “very seriously,” they say “steps”, taking steps to protect people’s voices with password safety and voice verification.
30 -year -old Cooper’s wife Silvi Burma says that this tool is proof that AI is “not only bad things.”
While her husband is enjoying the process of using AI tools, for Burma, the recording process is reminiscent of the reality of the disease and the couple face couples to deteriorate cooper’s health.
When she listens to her to recording her at home, Burma says that she steps into her sanctuary – her garden.
“I just went away,” she says. “We know that it’s coming, but I like not to think much further.
“It’s going to be a legacy.”
