I recall reading somewhere that Stephen Hawking's original voice was a DECtalk, specifically a voice included with it called "Paul". I'm guessing that, in order to keep this voice, someone had to dump the samples from a DECtalk or even call up HP to see if they could buy the masters. The article says he copyrighted the voice, so I'm willing to bet it was more the latter.
It's interesting to note that until 2001, the "Paul" voice was used by NOAA to broadcast weather alerts to automatic weather radios. It's also interesting to note that the voice itself was a series of samples recorded by Dennis Klatt, a researcher who dedicated his career to helping the disabled speak again and passed away shortly after the DECtalk was released. That Hawking was able to adopt it as his own, is a rather sweet tale with a cyberpunk twist.
the master from his voice never belonged to HP, it is owned by Nuance after multiple acquisition. The original owner was Speech Plus, who made the CallText 5010 synth he used until this year.
They indeed were looking for the masters [1].
When they found it they made a replacement for the voice synth on software running in a raspberry pi. They had just replaced the the old voice synth back in Jan. [2]
Additionally, Dennis Klatt was the inventor of DECTalk, the three original voices were his own for the male voice, his wife voice for the female voice and his daughter voice for a child voice, they were named Perfect Paul, that was the default voice, Beautiful Betty and Kit the Kid.
> the three original voices were his own for the male voice, his wife voice for the female voice and his daughter voice for a child voice, they were named Perfect Paul, that was the default voice, Beautiful Betty and Kit the Kid.
Given Ramachandran's Phantom Limb experiments, the "hit a fake hand with a hammer" experiment, and an experiment done by a crazy/brilliant Swede[1], I think it's very plausible that Hawking though of the synthesized voice as his voice. (I mean, he intellectually knew that it wasn't, but that doesn't make the feeling go away.)
[1] I can't find a link for the life of me, but I think I saw it on BBC's Horizon programme where a person wears a camera helmet which is showing a different person's perspective which includes the wearer as a "third person". In a few minutes the wearer starts to feel dissociated from their own body and starts to feel associated with the "viewer". It's a really weird and interesting experiment. Hopefully, this'll spark a memory and someone can find a video.
Thank you, but that's just the "plain" phantom limb illusion. I was thinking of a completely different documentary -- the person was actually wearing a complete VR setup. (Now that I think about it, I think it might have been a researcher at Uppsala University. Just in case anyone finds this comment in future.)
Ah fantastic - I hadn't seen that one ... - it's also not available at present in the UK from that BBC link, but it gave enough info for me to find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X09TgwcfQyA -- hopefully that works for you, thanks.
This actually makes a lot of sense since the Speak and Spell toy we all grew up with has a similar voice to Hawking. The link you provided shows that they used related synthesis models
It's interesting to note that until 2001, the "Paul" voice was used by NOAA to broadcast weather alerts to automatic weather radios. It's also interesting to note that the voice itself was a series of samples recorded by Dennis Klatt, a researcher who dedicated his career to helping the disabled speak again and passed away shortly after the DECtalk was released. That Hawking was able to adopt it as his own, is a rather sweet tale with a cyberpunk twist.
You can compare the DECtalk "Paul" voice with Klatt's own voice here: http://www.festvox.org/history/klatt.html