[tgraham]

100%. The tech my father tried to use in the last year of his MND was so poor (effort to train it, reality of what it delivered- jilted voice).

The impact on his quality of life - imagine not being able to communicate at all - would have been massive were it better.

[voakbasda]

This makes me wonder whether we could create a standard monologue that someone could record, which provides a complete set of training data for that individual. Something about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog would be apropos here, but I suspect the length would be more Shakespearian than that simple typographic clever sentence.

I expect it will be a while until we can fully utilize that data, but I have to imagine that something could be done today to preserve my voice (while I am still in my prime). Effectively, this would be a sort of vocal cryogenics, betting that we can do something today that will allow us to take advantage of future technology.

[r_hoods_ghost]

This is basically what you do currently for a TTS engine if you have ALS or similar. The search term you want is "voice banking". You are given a long list of words and sentences, often complex, to read out that have all the different sounds and then these are re combined by the software. The problem is that by the time you know you need this, you often already have speech problems and so making clear sounds is difficult. Also if you're like my relative who was trilingual you would need to do it in all three languages using the current system. She got a half way decent voice bank in her native tongue, but it was still noticeably slurred. She didn't even attempt it in her second and third tongues.