Getting Voice: New Speech Synthesis Could Make Roger Ebert Sound More Like Himself
After Roger Ebert lost the ability to speak in 2006 due to a post-cancer surgery tracheostomy, the film critic has communicated via Post-It notes, an eloquent and hilarious array of hand gestures, and his Mac laptop synthesizer. The version that read out pre-typed introductions at his annual film festival in 2009 had an upper-class English accent the British might call "emollient." Ebert and his wife Chaz called it "Sir Laurence" and shortly thereafter replaced it with a more accessible American–accented voice called "Alex." By next year, Ebert may sound even more like himself, courtesy of personalized voice work being carried out by the Edinburgh-based company CereProc (short for cerebral processing and pronounced "serra-prock").Ebert's extensive media recordings--not the least of which is the long-running TV series At the Movies --had led many people to suggest something like this. In his autobiography, Life Itself: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing),...