these are my words but this is not my voice this is alex the best computer voice i 've been able to find which comes as standard equipment on every macintosh
for most of my life i never gave a second thought to my ability to speak it was like breathing in those days i was living in a fool 's paradise after surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak eat or drink i was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me
for several days now we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at ted i used to be able to talk like that
maybe i wasn 't as smart but i was at least as talkative
i want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one 's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away however i 've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous
so i 've decided to recruit some of my ted friends to read my words aloud for me i will start with my wife chaz
it was chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak
going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in two thousand and six i expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show ebert and roeper at the movies
my tongue larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected
the first surgery was a great success
i saw myself in the mirror and i looked pretty good two weeks later i was ready to return home i was using my ipod to play the leonard cohen song i 'm your man for my doctors and nurses
suddenly i had an episode of catastrophic bleeding my carotid artery had ruptured
thank god i was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there
chaz told me that if that song hadn 't played for so long i might have already been in the car on the way home and would have died right there and then so thank you leonard cohen for saving my life
and then a third attempt
which also patched me back together pretty well
until it failed
a doctor from brazil said he had never seen anyone survive
a carotid artery rupture
and before i left the hospital after a year of being hospitalized
i had seven ruptures of my carotid artery there was no particular day when anyone told me i would never speak again it just sort of became obvious
human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath
within the sound chamber of our mouth
and respiratory system
we need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath
in order to form sounds
therefore the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air
because i had lost my jaw i could no longer form a seal and therefore my tongue
and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless
and nobody had to try to read my handwriting i tried out various computer voices that were available online and for several months i had a british accent which chaz called sir lawrence
then apple released the alex voice which was the best i 'd heard it knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark when it saw a period it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air there are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and
for me they share a fundamental problem they 're too slow
when i find myself in a conversational situation i need to type fast and to jump right
people don 't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase
but what value do we place on the sound of our own voice how does that affect who you are as a person
when people hear alex speaking my words do they experience a disconnect does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next
how did i feel not being able to speak i felt and i still feel a lot of distance from the human mainstream i 've become uncomfortable when i 'm separated from my laptop even then i 'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties
so we contacted a company in scotland that created personalized computer voices they 'd never made one from previously recorded materials all of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth but they were willing to give it a try
so i sent them many hours of recordings of my voice including several audio commentary tracks that i 'd made for movies on dvds
and it sounded like me it really did there was a reason for that it was me
but it wasn 't that simple the tapes from my tv show weren 't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved movie soundtracks for example or gene siskel arguing with me
when i heard it the first time
it makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while i was commenting on casablanca and citizen kane this is the first voice they 've created for an individual there are several very good voices available for computers but they all sound like somebody else
while this voice sounds like me i plan to use it on television radio and the internet people who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built in speaking systems many blind people use them to read pages on the web to themselves
they said i talked too much
and now i still can
the flow isn 't natural the good people in scotland are still improving my voice and i 'm optimistic about it but so far the apple alex voice is the best one i 've heard i wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played alex
he said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice a very large sample is needed
now i have spoken my last words
and i don 't even remember for sure what they were i feel like the hero of that harlan ellison story titled i have no mouth and i must scream
on wednesday david christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time span of the universe for almost all of its millions and billions of years there was no life on earth at all
for almost all the years of life on earth there was no intelligent life
only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next
did civilization become possible in cosmological terms that was about ten minutes ago
finally came mankind 's most advanced and mysterious tool the computer that has mostly happened in my lifetime some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of urbana the birthplace of hal nine thousand
when i heard the amazing talk by salman khan on wednesday about the khan academy website
that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world i had a flashback
it was about one thousand nine hundred and sixty as a local newspaper reporter still in high school i was sent over to the computer lab of the university of illinois to interview the creators of something called plato the initials stood for programmed logic for automated teaching operations
this was a computer assisted instruction system
which in those days ran on a computer named illiac
the programmers said it could assist students in their learning i doubt on that day fifty years ago they even dreamed of what salman khan has accomplished but that 's not the point the point is plato was only fifty years ago an instant in time
it continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers until only five years ago
i have learned from wikipedia that starting with that humblebeginning plato established forums message boards online testing email chat rooms
picture languages instant messaging remotescreen sharing and multiple player games since the first web browser was also developed in urbana
it appears that my hometown in downstate illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual online universe we occupy today but i 'm not here from the chamber of commerce
and when i told the people in the press room at the academy awards that they 'd better install some phone lines for internet connections they didn 't know what i was talking about when i bought my first desktop it was a dec rainbow does anybody remember that
named the porteram telebubble i joined compuserve when it had fewer numbers than i currently have followers on twitter
it is unimaginable what will happen next
at all because without intelligence and memory there is no history for billions of years the universe evolved completely without notice
we are born into a box of time and space
we use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others
for me the internet began as a useful tool and now has become something i rely on for my actual
daily existence
i cannot speak i can only type so fast
computer voices
are sometimes not very sophisticated but with my computer i can communicate more widely than ever before
not everybody
but online everybody speaks at the same speed
this whole adventure has been a learning experience every time there was a surgery that failed i was left with a little less flesh and bone now i have no jaw left at all
while harvesting tissue from both my shoulders the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily ironic that my legs are fine and it 's my shoulders that slow up my walk
when you see me today i look like the phantom of the opera but no you don 't
it is human nature to look at someone like me and assume i have lost some of my marbles
people talk loudly i 'm so sorry
people talk loudly and slowly to me sometimes they assume i am deaf
there are people who don 't want to make eye contact
we don 't enjoy a reminder of our own fragilemortality that 's why writing on the internet has become a lifesaver for me
my ability to think and write have not been affected and on the web my real voice finds expression i have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way
one of the funniest blogs on the web is written by a friend of mine named smartass cripple
all of these people are saying in one way or another that what you see is not all you get so i have not come here to complain
i have much to make me happy and relieved i seem for the time being to be cancer free
i am writing as well as ever i am productive
if i were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago
i would be as isolated as a hermit i would be trapped inside my head
because of the rush of human knowledge because of the digital revolution i have a voice and i do not need to scream
you all know the test for artificialintelligence the turing test a human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer if the judge can 't tell the machine apart from the human the machine has passed the test
i now propose a test for computer voices the ebert test if a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as henny youngman then that 's the voice i want
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