INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightJamie DupreeImage caption
Radio journalist Jamie Dupree will be able to broadcast again thanks to
artificial intelligence
A US radio journalist who lost his voice two years ago will soon return to the air, thanks to
artificial intelligence.Jamie Dupree, 54, a political radio journalist with Cox Media Group, is unable to talk due to a rare neurological
A new voice was created for him by Scottish technology company CereProc.CereProc trained a neural network to predict how Mr Dupree would
talk, using samples from his old voice recordings."This has saved my job and saved my family from a terrible financial unknown," Mr Dupree
told the TheIndianSubcontinent
"There is not much of a market for radio reporters who can't talk."Typically, in order to create a voice for someone, the individual needs
to read out a script for 30 hours in order to gather enough data.Then artificial intelligence is applied to either chop up words from the
audio file and stick them back together on demand, or the technology is used to predict and imitate the person's speech patterns.Both of
these methods can cost tens of thousands of pounds, and take a month to produce just one voice.Neural networks To speed up the process and
make it more affordable, CereProc started developing its own neural networks in 2006.Today, its artificial intelligence system can generate
Image copyrightCereProcImage caption
Users record themselves reading out a sequence of sentences, which can be then
turned into a voice
The neural networks, which contain between six to 10 layers each, work by slicing audio recordings of
words down to phonetics.The artificial intelligence system slices each word read out by an individual into 100 tiny pieces, and does this
with lots of common words until eventually it understands how basic phonetics work in that person's voice and has an ordered sequence for
all the pieces in each word.Then, the neural network can create its own sounds and predict what the person would sound like if they were to
say a series of words in conversation.Many computer scientists around the world are trying to replicate the human brain by training neural
networks to perform image recognition, but CereProc says that it is much easier to apply artificial intelligence to sound."AI techniques
work quite well on small constrained problems, and learning to model speech is something deep neural nets can do really well," Chris
Pidcock, CereProc's chief technical officer and co-founder, told the TheIndianSubcontinent."It's a much more solvable problem than machine
intelligence."Silenced by illnessMr Dupree has been covering political news from Congress in Washington DC for the past 35 years
And as a journalist producing content for six radio stations, his voice is essential to his work
He began losing his voice in 2016, but there was nothing wrong with his vocal cords, throat or larynx
After baffling doctors from several large US university hospitals, eventually Mr Dupree was diagnosed with tongue protrusion dystonia - a
rare neurological condition where the tongue pushes forward out of his mouth and his throat tightens whenever he wants to speak, making it
impossible for him to say more than two or three words at a time.Rather than give up his work, Mr Dupree continued to do interviews with
policymakers in Congress using an eWriter tablet to scribble questions during one-to-one interviews, or by recording the answers given to
groups of journalists in the Senate building's hallways between hearings.Image copyrightJamie DupreeImage caption
Jamie
Dupree at work in a radio studio
Although he was still writing and producing stories, he had essentially gone off the air
completely, because he could not present the stories he had written.Then, in December, a member of the US Congress spoke out on his behalf
on the floor of the House of Representatives.The resulting media attention spurred his employer to try to find a way for Mr Dupree to return
to the air, since it had almost 30 years' worth of his radio broadcasts on file
A new voice Thanks to the computer-generated voice produced by CereProc, from Monday, 25 June, onwards Mr Dupree will once again be heard by
WSB Atlanta listeners, as well as audiences of Cox Media-owned stations in Orlando, Jacksonville, Dayton and Tulsa
With his new voice, Mr Dupree can now write a script and then use a free text-to-speech software program called Balabolka on his laptop to
turn it into an audio recording
If a word or turn of phrase doesn't sound quite right in the recording, he can slow certain consonants or vowels down, or swap a word to one
that does work, or change the pitch, and he can have a full radio story ready to go live in just seven minutes
"It is me, there is no doubt about that," said Mr Dupree."Yes, it is slightly robotic, but no-one was promising me that it was going to be
perfect."In person, when talking to family and colleagues, Mr Dupree still has to rely on the eWriter tablet, or saying a couple of words
slowly, but the new voice has made a big difference to his life."This is awesome," he said
"Writing for my blog, sending out tweets and doing Facebook is great - but there is nothing like cranking out a 20-second story jammed with
a couple of sound bites to make the top of the hour newscast."
