Going forward, this program will change how people live with ALS around the world as it enables them to keep communicating as themselves, rather than through a proxy machine voice or a limited set of pre-recorded phrases.

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With a custom machine learning algorithm that analyses and completely recreates a person's voice, Project Revoice gives ALS patients the full use of their own authentic voices, allowing them to speak freely and naturally even after they physically can't. To launch the program we recreated the voice of Pat Quinn, who co-founded the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge while fighting the disease himself.

In March 2018, surrounded by his family and friends Pat was finally able to speak again in his own voice, after over a year in silence. This emotional moment became the heart of our launch campaign, which started in our owned channels only but quickly spread through social conversations and earned media, primarily in US, Canada, UK and Australian markets.

To make this technology available to the wider ALS community, Project Revoice has built an online voice bank where ALS sufferers can easily record the voice material necessary for their own voice clones. By the end of 2018 these recordings will be used to create more 'Revoices', which users can access and 'speak' with through the website or a custom API, via their own Assisted/Augmentative Communication (AAC) devices.

Since launch, Project Revoice has received significant interest from both the ALS community and the general public around the world:

Over 850 million earned media reach

Over one million organic video views in the first week.

By week two over 41 million people had posted, commented shared or mentioned the campaign.

Over 670 articles written globally

Currently over 100 patients a week are signing up to receive their own Revoice. On average, 105 people a week are diagnosed with ALS in the United States.

To rebuild Pat's voice we had to create a data bank of audio for the algorithm to work with. Since Pat hadn't banked any audio himself, our challenge was to build a sufficient data bank from old Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online. In a sense, it was only because Pat gave the ALS community a voice through the Ice Bucket Challenge that we were able to give him his own voice back.

After sourcing over 100 individual files of varying quality, we manually analyzed, cleaned up and transcribed every usable section to create a unified data bank for the algorithm to work with. Once the voice had been cloned through Lyrebird technology, we built a custom user interface for Pat to access the voice through his eye-tracking computer.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Motor Neurone Disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Within a couple of years of diagnosis, most patients end up paralysed in a wheelchair and forced to communicate via text-to-speech devices, typically with a default 'computer' voice. Since voices are so deeply personal this stage of the disease is particularly difficult for patients and caregivers. Currently, the only way people with ALS can use their own voices is by banking thousands of sentences, which can be repurposed as a set of standard phrases (message banking) or words mechanically stitched together from recorded syllables. Our goal was to change the way people live with ALS by giving sufferers the full use of their own authentic voices.