Where you can help, part two.

After the more depressing please-help thingies I posted yesterday, here is a different one where you can help. I've stumbled across this through the chat on HabitRPG (I posted about this before, here) and it's an absolutely fascinating project - though if you want to join in, it will take a few hours of your time.

Voices, like fingerprints, are something deeply personal. For a lot of speech-impaired people, though, there are communication machines with only very few standard voices to choose from. VocaliD is a project that aims to remedy this, by blending the sound characteristics extracted from sounds the speech-impaired person can make with the (missing) rest of the voice-forming properties from an actual human voice. And you can actually become a voice-donor and help with that!

Rupal Patel explains it all in much more detail and depth in her TED talk. Which I found deeply touching - she really does bring the point across that a voice is a deeply personal thing.

If you are game to help now, you can go visit VocaliD and support them. For the moment, they are recording English speakers, but my guess is that if this works nicely, there will be a demand for other languages as well (and also, maybe, more than one language spoken by a single person).