A woman lost her voice, but artificial intelligence gave her back her voice.
Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had a golf ball-sized vascular tumor near the back of her brain that was compressing her brainstem and entangled with blood vessels and cranial nerves.
Doctors removed the life-threatening tumor in a 10-hour surgery in August 2023. But when Bogan was removed from her breathing tube, her tongue muscles and vocal cords were damaged.
It affected her ability to eat and speak. She struggled to swallow and could barely choke out a “hello” to her parents.
But a few months later, AI came to the rescue.
In April, Bogan received an AI-generated voice clone that was available through an app on his phone. Just type it into your phone and the app will instantly read out the words to you.
Before the miracle of her voice, even after months of rehabilitation, the 21-year-old still struggled to speak and make sure her loved ones understood what she was saying.
“When I lost my voice, it felt like part of my identity was taken away,” Bogan says. told the Associated Press. “At some point I started forgetting what my voice sounded like.”
Her new app-based voice is sourced from a 15-second cooking video she recorded for a high school project with the help of Lifespan Hospital Group in Rhode Island, and her vocals as a teenager can be used for authentic voices.
“Every time I hear her voice, I get very emotional,” her mother, Pamela, said through tears.
Bogan was one of the first people to use OpenAI’s new speech engine to recover lost audio. Doctors believe this is one use of AI that outweighs the risks.
“We’re hopeful that Lexi will be a pioneer in the advancement of technology,” Dr. Rohaid Ali, a neurosurgery resident at Brown University School of Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital, told The Associated Press. , or patients with neurodegenerative diseases, it added. disease.
Bogan now uses the app everywhere from Starbucks to Target to Marshalls to support her daily encounters.
“I think it’s great to be able to hear that sound again,” Bogan said, noting that it “gave me back some confidence to where I was before all this happened.”
Risks of AI voice cloning technology include non-consensual voice reproduction (getting people to say things they never said), as well as phone fraud, deepfake robocalls, and more.
“We need to be aware of the risks, but we cannot forget about the benefits to patients and society,” said Dr. Fatima Mirza, another medical resident involved in the pilot. “We were able to help Lexi regain her true voice, so she can now speak to herself in her truest words.”
Because this is the first time Bogan is using this technology with this condition, she is able to provide feedback on how to make the technology better and more accessible, including how the voice ages as we get older. I did.
“She was a huge inspiration to us,” Mirza said.
“My voice hasn’t completely returned, but there are things that will help me get my voice back,” Bogan said.
