A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Back when the great Charlie Bird was first diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease in 2021, one of his greatest fears was losing that unique voice — which was where a pair of Dublin-based design innovators came in.

Keith Davey is the founder of Marino Software in Dublin and Trevor Vaugh is assistant professor at the Department of Design Innovation in NUI Maynooth — and, in the early stages of the age of artificial intelligence, they came up with an app to replicate those unmistakable tones.

They were blessed with a veritable tsunami of recorded material of Charlie’s voice and they, with Charlie’s wife Claire, sifted through realms of reports, eventually narrowing them down to three hours of clear, crisp audio.

That was enough to give Charlie back his voice — a cloned voice and almost indistinguishable from the original — albeit that this came through his computer.

Sarah Ezekiel is a 59-year-old English woman who was diagnosed with MND at the age of 34 — within months of her becoming a mum for the second time.

For most of their lives, her children Aviva and Eric only ever heard her speak through a machine with an emotionless robotic voice.

But 25 years on, the latest incarnation of AI has recreated Sarah’s real voice — from just eight seconds of audio on a scratchy VHS tape.

This chapter of her story began when Bristol-based assistive technology company, Smartbox, asked her for an hour’s worth of audio to recreate her voice.

The problem was that Sarah had lost her voice in 2000, before smart phones were in common place and before social media captured moments.

So all they could find just eight seconds of her on an old VHS tape, shot on a family camcorder in the 1990s; the sound was as distorted as you’d expect from technology that old — not helped that the chat was also drowned out by a blaring TV.

But they used one form of technology to isolate those precious eight seconds and married that to the eye-gaze technology Sarah uses — it’s a camera to track her eyes as she looks at letters on a screen in front of her — and last week, Sarah heard her real voice for the first time in a quarter of a century.