When he’s not writing, Ebert uses his MacBook to speak for him via a voice “called Alex, a voice with a generic American accent and a generic tone and no emotion. At first Ebert spoke with a voice called Lawrence, which had an English accent. Ebert liked sounding English, because he is an Anglophile, and his English voice reminded him of those beautiful early summers when he would stop in London with [his wife] Chaz on their way home after the annual chaos of Cannes,” Jones reports. “But the voice can be hard to decipher even without an English accent layered on top of it — it is given to eccentric pronunciations, especially of names and places — and so for the time being, Ebert has settled for generic instead.”
“Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don’t all have to sound like Stephen Hawking. They have catalog voices — Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue — with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. 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,” Jones reports. “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.”
Full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Note: Read also: Roger Ebert’s Journal: “Roger Ebert’s Last Words, con’t.”
[UPDATE: March 2, 2010, 5:20pm ET: This article was originally published on February 19, 2010 under the headline "Roger Ebert’s MacBook soon to speak for him with his own voice." Now we have the first footage of Ebert using his new "old" voice with his Apple MacBook. This is the first time Ebert has spoken with his "own" voice since 2006:
Direct link via Videogum here.
A shorter segment of the same video is also available via YouTube here.
[Attribution: Cult of Mac.]
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