🗣 Unheard immunity
The United Kingdom's Motor Neurone Disease Association is giving people more than just their voices back
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Close your eyes and listen to the sounds surrounding you. What can you tell about the environment that you’re in? The reality is, you take in so much information by simply hearing sounds all around you. As humans, we can decipher someone’s implied meaning merely through their voice’s tone, pitch, and pace, then conclude on whether it’s something serious, sarcastic, or comedic. All that to say, let’s appreciate how elaborate our hearing and vocals are, because some of us may not be so lucky…
Some people develop a degenerative terminal condition called Motor Neurone Disease (MND), affecting their brain and nervous system. Unfortunately at this time, there is no cure for MND. Patients suffering with the condition can expect to feel reduced leg motility, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, and a weakened grip along with cramping or twitching. For over 80% of patients, MND affects articulation and vocal cords, rendering their speech incomprehensible.
We all deserve to be heard for our ideas, thoughts, and feelings, in our own voice. This is why Intel and Dell Technologies, in partnership with the UK’s MND Association and Rolls-Royce, have launched “I Will Always Be Me” — a book that banks a patient’s voice before they permanently lose their ability to speak naturally.
Let’s explore what makes “I Will Always Be Me” so critical in giving people living with MND more than just their voices back.
What is it?
“I Will Always Be Me” is an e-book found on its website bearing the same name. It helps patients suffering from MND — or similar conditions (like ALS) — bank their voices while reading the book. The book was written by New York Times #1 bestselling author Jill Twiss, and illustrated by the award-winning Nicholas Stevenson. The story of the book follows the journey that someone with MND goes through, in words they may struggle to express. It uses a first-person narrator’s point of view, further driving the aspect of communication with surrounding loved ones.
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Voice banking describes the process of saving a person’s voice, so that it can later be used with digital speech aids. Typically, the voice is recorded with the patient over months, reading around 1,600 random words and phrases, with results that are quite robotic and monotone sounding.
That’s where “I Will Always Be Me” comes in: all the sounds needed to synthesize the voice is contained within the text of the 30 minute story, banking sounds much closer to the person’s natural voice. This is a more suitable option for effective communication, and simply put, much more natural-sounding.
How it works?
After accessing “I Will Always Be Me”, the person can begin the 30 minute recording process. In that time, they will read a story that triggers an emotional rollercoaster, allowing for the capture of more nuanced intonations and pronunciations through varying sentiments. This is what gives the end result a much more natural sound unique to the person.
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“I Will Always Be Me” uses SpeakUnique’s Machine Learning algorithms to analyze the person’s voice, pitch, tone, and pace. This in turn helps faithfully synthesize the digital voice for later use with the speech aid.
Why it matters?
First and foremost, this matters because it changed an old, solitary method of voice banking that resulted in a monotone and robotic synthesized voice. “I Will Always Be Me” found a way to involve family members, bringing them together during the recording of the affected person’s voice. This alone has had an immeasurable impact on families living with MND, fostering a more natural, life-like digital voice. This warms our hearts.
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Lots of technologies like these are born as means to provide better accessibility for those that need it the most. It serves the purpose of levelling the playing field for everyone. With all his limitations, the great Stephen Hawking — who suffered from ALS — was still able to communicate with us, and that’s an amazing thing! An interesting outcome from these developments is that they eventually make their way to the general masses, augmenting our traditional processes, behaviours, and interactions. With that said, here are some of the reasons we think “I Will Always Be Me” is important:
Offers MND patients greater empathy during the voice banking process
Provides accessibility for those with reduced speech ability
Informs and improves Natural Language Processing (NLP) over time
Helps humanize Virtual Assistants’ speech, tone, pitch, and pace
By analyzing people’s voices while reading the book, machine learning models can be taught to recognize the expected intonation in any part of the story. With better sentiment analysis and detection, AIs can be better trained to communicate with us.
Ask yourself — what if Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant could detect how you felt when conversing with them? How could their deeper knowledge of a conversation’s context be more helpful to you?
Additionally, think of how these virtual assistants can develop more elaborate and convincing digital speech and patterns, which simultaneously helps you better understand them. Hence, a more symbiotic human-machine relationship!
More on the technologies and trends that bring this innovation to life, and the Foresight Factor™ score, further down below 👇
Closing Thoughts
It’s important to look at the emergent technologies and trends that “I Will Always Be Me” combines, leverages, and builds upon. Timing is important for an innovation to gain traction. The Foresight Factor™ is the score we give to these innovations based on the relevancy of these trends, and other factors that impact its feasibility, viability, and desirability.
Trends
Voice & Speech Recognition | Voice and speech recognition is nothing new, but amid the mass virtualization-of-everything brought forth by the pandemic, it has grown significantly. The global market for voice and speech recognition technology was at $7.7 billion in 2020, with an annual growth of 18.1%, resulting in an expected $20.9 billion in 2026. Some various applications include voice-based commerce, virtual assistants, customer service, healthcare, and more. Voice recognition designates the ability to detect who is talking, whereas speech recognition can understand what is being said.
Virtual Assistants | Virtual assistants are nearly everywhere nowadays! They are embedded into our devices (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant…), as well as online products and services through chatbots, digital companions, and other forms. They understand spoken or typed natural language commands, helping us complete daily tasks. The Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) global market is expected to reach a whopping $50.9 billion by 2028, at an impressive year over year growth of 30%! Major players in the market are Nuance (now owned by Microsoft), Microsoft, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple, Amazon, IBM Corporation, Samsung Electronics, and Alphabet (Google) to name a few.
The Foresight Factor™
The Foresight Factor™ score averages several factors that make up an innovation’s feasibility, viability, and desirability, and is rated out of a total of 10 points. Here’s how “I Will Always Be Me” ranks:
We thank you all for tuning into this week’s innovation. Feel free to share your comments and questions below to get the conversation started. Cheers and keep looking forward to the future!