🎙 AI Gave a Woman Her Lost Voice Back After 25 Years

Sarah Ezekiel, a 59-year-old artist from London, lost her voice at the age of 34 due to progressive amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (the same disease that Stephen Hawking had). As a result, her son Eric and daughter Aviva grew up without ever hearing their mother's voice.

Specialists from the British company Smartbox developed a speech synthesizer for Sarah and asked her for an hour-long recording of her voice. However, she was only able to find an 8-second home video taken in the 1990s, which had the TV on in the background.

Then Smartbox developer Simon Poole used AI tools from ElevenLabs. The first AI tool cleaned the voice sample of noise, and another model, trained on thousands of voices, was able to fill in the gaps to produce the final sound.

The result was very close to the woman's original voice, including her London accent and slight lisp, which she had once hated.

"I sent samples to her and she wrote an email back to me saying she nearly cried when she heard it. She said she played it to a friend who knew her from before she lost her voice and it was like having her own voice back," Poole said.

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