Why explain who Linda Ronstadt is, when this trailer for her recent documentary can do it better than I ever could?
It’s appropriately titled The Sound Of My Voice:
The legendary singer was diagnosed, around a decade ago, with a disease that has taken her famous voice away.
VocaliD, a Boston company led by Rupal Patel, offers a service called Vocal Legacy which enables those who know they will lose their voice, to preserve it. (Rupal Patel appeared in Season 4 of This Week In Voice here.)
The reasons for preserving one’s voice this way could be many - the ability to continue to speak, after one’s voice is gone, or for family members to be able to preserve memories of a person after that person passes away.
This article about the company’s voice preservation initiative provides a good window into the many empathetic qualities of the organization.
From VocaliD’s website:
VocaliD can use your speech recordings in The Human Voicebank to create your personalized digital voice.
Think of it as insurance against a day when a voice is lost or unavailable for whatever reason.
The noble work of companies like VocaliD dovetails in a fascinating way with what Amazon has done to bring Samuel L. Jackson’s celebrity voice to their voice assistant.
Amazon announced late last year that Alexa users could engage with Samuel L. Jackson, and could enable either a PG or R-rated version of the famous actor. The Alexa skill that would allow this would initially be $1, before going to $5 permanently.
Today, Amazon added an additional wrinkle to this, creating a “Hey Samuel” wake word for Alexa, along with 30,000 new phrases and 5 times the explicit content of the previous version of the skill.
In other words, users no longer have to say the cumbersome “Alexa, ask Samuel for the weather,” and can instead simply say “Hey Samuel, what’s the weather?” before being summarily roasted for bothering him with such trifling details.
Oddly, it’s Samuel L. Jackson’s comedic arrival on Alexa which has ignited vast potential to open eyes that any voice could be used for any voice assistant.
What I expect to see now is a market start to develop for third-party voices akin to what ringtones are for mobile devices (minus the precipitous decline out of nowhere after rocketing to popularity).
And once mainstream voice assistants move beyond simple queries and become truer versions of artificial intelligence, the concept of replacing a native voice with a chosen third-party voice that means something to us will be considered essential.
We’ve long known about some of the power recorded voices have to impact us as humans, but how much better would our lives be if we had access to them throughout each and every day?
Would we value them?
Or would we de-value them?
I'm going back someday,
come what may,
to Blue Bayou.
Where the folks are fun,
and the world is mine,
on Blue Bayou.
Where those fishing boats
with their sails afloat…
If I could only see
that familiar sunrise
through sleepy eyes,
how happy I'd be.
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