Towards Personalized Synthesized Voices for Individuals with Vocal Disabilities: Voice Banking and Reconstruction

When individuals lose the ability to produce their own speech, due to degenerative diseases such as motor neurone disease (MND) or Parkinson’s, they lose not only a functional means of communication but also a display of their individual and group identity. In order to build personalized synthetic voices, attempts have been made to capture the voice before it is lost, using a process known as voice banking. But, for some patients, the speech deterioration frequently coincides or quickly follows diagnosis. Using HMM-based speech synthesis, it is now possible to build personalized synthetic voices with minimal data recordings and even disordered speech. The power of this approach is that it is possible to use the patient’s recordings to adapt existing voice models pre-trained on many speakers. When the speech has begun to deteriorate, the adapted voice model can be further modified in order to compensate for the disordered characteristics found in the patient’s speech. The University of Edinburgh has initiated a project for voice banking and reconstruction based on this speech synthesis technology. At the current stage of the project, more than fifteen patients with MND have already been recorded and five of them have been delivered a reconstructed voice. In this paper, we present an overview of the project as well as subjective assessments of the reconstructed voices and feedback from patients and their families