Esquire magazine has a marvelous profile of film critic Roger Ebert, who has lost his lower jaw and voice box after several years of cancer treatments.
Having lost the ability to speak, Ebert is pouring himself into writing instead.
His astonishing online journal runs to more than 500,000 words on topics as disparate as his life, the afterlife (none-he’s atheist), alcoholism, travel, books, and friends, living and dead.
To communicate in everyday life, Ebert uses text-to-speech on his MacBook Pro, Stephen Hawking-style.
The voice Ebert uses is “Alex” — the generic American voice built into OS X – mainly because it recognizes question marks and exclamation points. It doesn’t deliver everything in a monotone.
But he’s soon to get an upgrade — his own voice.
Ebert is working with a Scottish text-to-speech company, CereProc. Based in Edinburgh, the company specializes in regional British accents, but can also build custom-voices for clients who recorded their voices at length — something Ebert has done after years on TV.
“CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does. There might be moments, when he calls for Chaz from another room or tells her that he loves her and says goodnight — he’s a night owl; she prefers mornings — when they both might be able to close their eyes and pretend that everything is as it was.”
