The voice of cosmology
How technology and chutzpah gave Stephen Hawking his voice back
“Diagnosed with a rare disease and told he had just a few years to live, he chose to live with new purpose,” said President Obama as he awarded Stephen Hawking the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. The British cosmologist, who died earlier this week, incarnated both genius and the triumph of the human spirit.
Seated in his motorized wheelchair, his body twisted by degenerative motor neurone disease, Hawking became one of the world’s most recognizable and recognized public figures. Almost as well-known as his disease-ravaged appearance was his computer-generated voice with its incongruous American accent.
“O, how wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul!” wrote the American poet Longfellow. Hawking’s body was already broken when he also lost his voice, but again his single-minded determination prevailed.
Over the years, Hawking’s speech had become increasingly difficult to understand, until he finally lost his natural voice completely following a tracheotomy. A major American technology company came to his rescue by developing an open source programme called ACAS.
The software enabled Hawking to interact with a tablet computer mounted on the arm of his wheelchair. He was able to build words by moving his cheek to select characters from an on-screen keyboard and sending them to a speech synthesizer.
Hawking claimed to have tried other Active Assisted Living technologies and to have experimented with eye tracking and brain controlled interfaces, but found cheek operated switching easier and less tiring to use. There are more details about Hawking’s speech-generating device in his own words on his official website.
Synthetic speech technology helps many people with disabilities around the world, providing, for example, reading aids for the blind and speaking aids for the deaf. Speech synthesis is also used in education as a reading aid for dyslexics, as well as to teach spelling and pronunciation.
Telephone inquiry systems also use speech synthesis.
Voice-recognition assistants work by using concatenative synthesis to create a human-computer interaction that combines speech synthesis with speech-to text recognition. Already commonplace in smartphones, voice-recognition assistant are increasingly found in homes as a hub through which to connect and control household appliances, order products online and stream music.
Technology enabled Hawking to continue writing and delivering lectures around the world, as well as appearing in TV shows. In Hawking’s view, however, technology could only make a difference when combined with a positive attitude.
Hawking always claimed that he coped with his disease by never pitying himself. Asked what he would say to someone who had been diagnosed with a serious illness, he said it was important not to be disabled in spirit as well as physically.
Hawking told his interviewer, “My advice to other disabled people would be concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with.”
