Voicebank wants more from lads

SOME 200 people have “donated” their voices to a voicebank programme at the Euan MacDonald Centre for Motor Neurone Disease Research.

The project aims to build a bank of recorded voices which will be used to create synthesised voices for those who have lost their speech as a result of the condition.

The centre, which is part of the University of Edinburgh, is hoping to record more voices from the over-40s, particularly men, and of people with Scottish accents other than Edinburgh.

In the new year, the centre will start recording the voices of patients which have been damaged, and “repairing” them using sounds form the donor recordings. This is a first step towards fully synthesising voices for use in communication aids.

For more information about the project, contact Shuna on [email protected].