Donate your voice. To create a voice bank available to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients and give them back the ability to communicate with a more human sound. Thanks to artificial intelligence. The project is called “Voice for purpose – Let’s give voice to ALS and was presented today in Rome in the presence of the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci.
Born from an intuition of Pino Insegno, actor and voice actor, the project aims to give life to a ‘voice bank’ with a double value: on the one hand it will allow people who have lost their speech to choose an expressive voice among all those that will be donated by people from all over the world; on the other, it will allow you to ‘save’ your voice, by recording it. This voice bank was born from the union of Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, NeMO Clinical Centers, Nemo Lab, Translated and Dream On. Objective: to allow people with vocal disabilities to use an expressive voice.
The project aims to create the conditions for every person with ALS to access a Voice Banking service to preserve their voice and benefit from the use of personal or donated speech synthesis, when verbal communication is only possible with the aid of supports and Augmentative-Alternative Communication (ACA) technological devices. This in order to maintain its identity also with the help of AAC technologies, which are currently supplied through the National Health System with a standard robotic and metallic vocal synthesis.
Anyone can donate their voice to those who don’t keep it and, to date, there are already 250 voices donated. When creating their profile on the ‘Voice For Purpose’ platform, the donor will be asked to register their voice by reading a short message. The potential donor will then be contacted only when selected by a person who needs to acquire a donated speech synthesis.