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

And there was no way to predict how lifelike the resulting voice would be—often it ended up sounding quite artificial. “It might sound a bit like them, but it certainly couldn’t be confused for them,” he says. Since then, the technology has improved, and for the last year or two the people Cave has worked with have only needed to spend around half an hour recording their voices. But though the process was quicker, he says, the resulting synthetic voice was no more lifelike.

Then came the voice clones. ElevenLabs has been developing AI-generated voices for use in films, televisions, and podcasts since it was founded three years ago, says Sophia Noel, who oversees partnerships between the company and nonprofits. The company’s original goal was to improve dubbing, making voice-overs in a new language seem more natural and less obvious. But then the technical lead of Bridging Voice, an organization that works to help people with ALS communicate, told ElevenLabs that its voice clones were useful to that group, says Noel. Last August, ElevenLabs launched a program to make the technology freely available to people with speech difficulties.

Suddenly, it became much faster and easier to create a voice clone, says Cave. Instead of having to record phrases, users can instead upload voice recordings from past WhatsApp voice messages or wedding videos, for example. “You need a minimum of a minute to make anything, but ideally you want around 30 minutes,” says Noel. “You upload it into ElevenLabs. It takes about a week, and then it comes out with this voice.”

Rodriguez played me a statement using both his banked voice and his voice clone. The difference was stark: The banked voice was distinctly unnatural, but the voice clone sounded like a person. It wasn’t entirely natural—the words came a little fast, and the emotive quality was slightly lacking. But it was a huge improvement. The difference between the two is, as Fernandez puts it, “like night and day.”

The ums and ers

Cave started introducing the technology to people with MND a few months ago. Since then, 130 of them have started using it, “and the feedback has been unremittingly good,” he says. The voice clones sound far more lifelike than the results of voice banking. “They [include] pauses for breath, the ums, the ers, and sometimes there are stammers,” says Cave, who himself has a subtle stammer. “That feels very real to me, because actually I would rather have a synthetic voice representing me that stammered, because that’s just who I am.”

Joyce Esser is one of the 130 people Cave has introduced to voice cloning. Esser, who is 65 years old and lives in Southend-on-Sea in the UK, was diagnosed with bulbar MND in May last year.

Bulbar MND is a form of the disease that first affects muscles in the face, throat, and mouth, which can make speaking and swallowing difficult. Esser can still talk, but slowly and with difficulty. She’s a chatty person, but she says her speech has deteriorated “quite quickly” since January. We communicated via a combination of email, video call, speaking, a writing board, and text-to-speech tools. “To say this diagnosis has been devastating is an understatement,” she tells me. “Losing my voice has been a massive deal for me, because it’s such a big part of who I am.”

COURTESY OF JOYCE ESSER

Esser has lots of friends all over the country, Paul Esser, her husband of 38 years, tells me. “But when they get together, they have a rule: Don’t talk about it,” he says. Talking about her MND can leave Joyce sobbing uncontrollably. She had prepared a box of tissues for our conversation.

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