By Geoff Smith (@smithco on Twitter)

Students volunteering their voices to help others speak

Feb 23, 2017 | 3:36 AM

LETHBRIDGE – “Laurie’s bashfulness soon wore off.”

When Dai Hewison normally takes to the studio for his campus radio show, it’s not to utter unrelated sentences like these.

“That business was a thing of the past.”

Hewison is in one of the CKXU studios at the University of Lethbridge, reciting seemingly random phrases into a microphone. He will spend a total of eight to ten hours, recording 3,500 sentences. Those sentences contain every combination of sounds in the English language.

Hewison is donating his voice.

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We’ve become accustomed to hearing people with special needs who communicate using a text-to-speech device. Think of the renowned English physicist Stephen Hawking, and the computer-synthesized voice through which he communicates. Now, imagine several people, from different walks of life, in a room together speaking in that same voice.

That’s the point made by the founders of VocaliD, a company that is creating a voice bank, to provide individuals with a voice that sounds like them. Those voices are being donated by volunteers like Hewison, who responded to a “voice drive” organized on campus by Jessica Diakow.

“We don’t think of it,” Diakow said. “Your voice is actually one of those things where it’s very personal to you. Your voice is your identity.”

Diakow first became involved through Volunteer Lethbridge, which is soliciting voice donations. The next step was to set up a voice drive targeting U of L students.

“I really wanted to try to bring the students together and give them this opportunity to record their voice, and I was really passionate about it,” she explained. People who donate their vocal efforts to the project need a good quality microphone and a place with good acoustics, and CKXU offered studio time.

For Hewison, there was a personal reason to get involved. His cousin has cerebral palsy.

“I watch her sometimes, with some people trying to talk for her or trying to finish her sentence, and I can see she gets frustrated,” Hewison said. “So I can understand how somebody that isn’t able to to converse like that, with a similar situation, (gets) frustrated because people are talking for them all the time.”

By his own admission, Hewison pronounces some things “weird.” He feels a unique-sounding voice might be a good match for someone. VocaliD uses algorithms to match a sample of the customer’s own voice with that of a donor, in some cases blending them together. The 3,500 phrases are deconstructed into individual sounds, so they can be reassembled into anything the speaker wants to say.

“They have a voice,” Hewison said. “It’s not just like a Speak & Spell-sounding computer voice. It’s something they can identify with, and really express themselves, and put some emotion into their speech, which is amazing, that we have that kind of technology now.”

While the campus voice drive was successful, Diakow says there are other opportunities for people who want to get involved. They can sign up through Volunteer Lethbridge, or directly on the VocaliD site, and even organize a voice drive of their own.