09 March 2011

Dr Sarah Creer comments on "voice banking"

Dr Sarah Creer, a member of the Speech and Hearing Research Group, has recently been interviewed on the subject of "voice banking".

The specific story, reported by BBC News, concerns a man with motor neurone disease who is "banking" his voice, so that his baby son will be able to hear it. Dr. Creer is an expert in the use of personalised speech synthesizers, and has commented on the story in the BBC article, and also in a number of subsequent radio interviews. She explains that voice banking involves building a personal database of speech utterances:

"When you have this database, the recordings are chopped into smaller units and then you can recombine those units to make new utterances. You will then actually be able to say anything at all that you wanted to say by recombining those units together."

You can hear an interview with Sarah on Radio 4's Today programme (between 2:46:50 and 2:50:254).

For more information about research into the clinical aspects of speech technology at Sheffield, see the CAST web pages.