![]() Klatt’s colleague and research scientist during the 1970s and 1980s, Joseph Perkell, described his work as exceptionally good, and praised his hard-working ethic: ‘He can function in the middle of a hurricane.’ Klatt spent hours generating human-like speech from text fed into his computer, using his own voice for the sound of “Perfect Paul”. Klatt had been working on speech synthesis since the 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he developed his algorithm, KlattTalk. I have also given many scientific and popular talks …I think that this is in a large part due to the quality of the speech synthesiser. This system allowed me to communicate much better than I could before …Using this system, I have written a book, and dozens of scientific papers. Thus, technology gave a voice to Hawking, who would have otherwise suffered from locked-in syndrome, a disorder in which a person is trapped within their body without being able to express their self. In fact, Hawking became so attached to Klatt’s voice that he considered it a part of his identity – upon being offered newer versions, such as the Speech Plus synthesiser in 1988, he preferred to continue with Klatt’s. One of these voices was Klatt himself, known as “Perfect Paul”, and became famous as the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking. This was widely used by those with disabilities, particularly people with low vision who used this system to read aloud computer text. Klatt also contributed to the development of the text-to-text speech system known as the “KlattTalk” TTS (text-to-speech) system. ![]() For example, his formant synthesis software, published in the Journal of Acoustical Society of America in 1980, is still used today by scientists concerned with the study of synthesising speech sounds. A speech synthesis pioneer, Klatt made several advances in the generation of high-quality human speech by machine. This was when the work of American scientist Dennis Klatt came in. It is pretty difficult to carry on a conversation like that, let alone write a scientific paper. ![]() Following an emergency tracheotomy in 1985, Hawking completely lost the ability to speak, which he described in his biography:įor a time, the only way I could communicate was to spell out words letter by letter, by raising my eyebrows when someone pointed to the right letter on a spelling card. It is well known that Hawking was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease – also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease of the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain that are responsible for voluntary movement – in his twenties. However, it was Hawking’s image and voice that caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter. Considered the most famous theoretical physicist of his generation, Hawking greatly advanced our understanding of black holes, predicting their ability to emit thermal radiation (now known as Hawking radiation). In his later years, Stephen Hawking’s voice became as famous as his ground-breaking theories on quantum gravity, black holes, and theoretical cosmology.
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