Text to speech engines have long been used to allow those who cannot talk to communicate verbally. Film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw and his voice to cancer, has taken it a step further by creating a TTS voice that sounds like him.

Using the hundreds of hours of archived film clips from his reviews and other TV appearances, Ebert’s voice was reconstructed by Scotland’s CereProc, a developer of text to speech technology.

Debuting his new voice on Tuesday on Oprah, Ebert said, “You’ll know it’s a computer, but one that sounds like me. It still needs improvement but at least it sounds like me. In first grade they said I talked too much, and now I still can.”

Originally from Voxeo Blogs