Synthetic speech can be a fearful object these days when paired with deepfakes and other AI deceptions, but it’s also an indispensable tool for anyone who can no longer speak on their own. Acapela Group has these folks squarely in mind with its new “my own voice” service, which lets anyone train an AI voice profile for free.
Acapela has been in the text-to-speech space for around 25 years, and was recently acquired by tech accessibility giant Tobii Dynavox, though they still operate independently.
Like many industries, accessibility has been heavily influenced by the advent of consumer-scale machine learning processes. 7 or 8 years ago, recalled Acapela co-founder Remy Cadic, it was not just tedious to customize a synthetic voice for yourself, but the results weren’t particularly good.
“It was very time consuming — the patient had to train for 8 hour...
