In many ways, our voices are what make us human. For most patients losing the voice is particularly difficult as it's such an integral part of one's personality. Project Revoice gives people with ALS the ability to speak freely and naturally in their own voice, even after they can't physically speak.

To launch the program, we recreated the voice of Pat Quinn, who co-founded the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge while fighting the disease himself. Since Pat hadn't backed up his voice in any way, we rebuilt his voice using audio data from Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online.

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

Project Revoice is powered by a custom machine learning algorithm that can analyze the unique characteristics (or DNA) of a voice - including tone, pitch and inflections. With only 2-3 hours of transcribed audio data as raw material, this technology is able to create a complete digital voice clone that's able to say anything in real-time via text input.

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 data 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.

Project Revoice represents a major improvement in life quality for people with ALS. While the technology is currently limited to English-speaking patients only, the ultimate goal of the program is to prevent anyone diagnosed with ALS from losing their voice.

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

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

$9.8 million estimated earned PR value.

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.

Project Revoice uses a unique deep learning algorithm to analyze recorded audio data and create a complete digital clone of a person's voice. When integrated with text-to-speech devices, this gives people with ALS (Motor Neurone Disease) the ability to speak freely and naturally in their own voice, even after they lose it. We launched this life-changing program by recreating the voice of Pat Quinn, ALS sufferer and co-founder of the Ice Bucket Challenge, using audio from interviews and speeches as raw material. We then integrated Pat's 'Revoice' with his eye-tracking computer and captured the moment when he finally spoke again.

To rebuild Pat's voice we had to create a databank of audio for the algorithm to work with. Since Pat hadn't banked any audio himself, our challenge was to build a sufficient databank from old Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online.

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.

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.

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. 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.