Title | PROJECT REVOICE |
Brand | THE ALS ASSOCIATION |
Product / Service | PROJECT REVOICE |
Category | E02. Innovative Use of Technology |
Entrant | BWM DENTSU Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Idea Creation | BWM DENTSU Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
PR | HAYSTAC Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Production | LYREBIRD Montreal, CANADA |
Production 2 | FINCH Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Production 3 | NAKATOMI Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Production 4 | RUMBLE STUDIOS Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Additional Company | SPACE 66 Sydney, AUSTRALIA |
Name | Company | Position |
---|---|---|
Rob Belgiovane | BWM Dentsu | Chief Creative Officer |
Asheen Naidu | BWM Dentsu | Executive Creative Director |
René Schultz | BWM Dentsu | Senior Art Director |
Oskar Westerdal | BWM Dentsu | Senior Copywriter |
Emma Durlacher | BWM Dentsu | Onscreen Producer |
Eeuwout 'Dutchy' Baart | BWM Dentsu | Design Director |
Jenna Mills | BWM Dentsu | Creative Services Director |
Brett Ludeman | FINCH | Director |
Brendon Killen | BWM Dentsu | Editor |
Jason Carnew | Haystac | National General Manager |
Sarah Littlefair | Haystac | General Manager Haystac Sydney |
Alexandre de Brébisson | Lyrebird | Co-Founder and CEO |
Jose Sotelo | Lyrebird | Co-Founder |
Kundan Kumar | Lyrebird | Co-Founder |
David Dodero | Lyrebird | Head of Operations |
Corey Esse | FINCH | Executive Producer |
Claire Thompson | FINCH | Producer |
Emad Tahtouh | Nakatomi | Managing Director |
Cara Szabo | Nakatomi | Producer |
Hamish Pain | Nakatomi | Engineer |
Patrick Barnes | Nakatomi | Senior Engineer |
Ben Bray | Nakatomi | Interactive Team Lead |
Tone Aston | Rumble Studios | Sound Designer |
Cam Milne | Rumble Studios | Sound Designer |
Sha Toth | Rumble Studios | Post Producer |
Michael Gie | Rumble Studios | Music Producer |
Darren Lim | Rumble Studios | Composer |
Christopher Gregson | Space 66 | General Manager |
Elliot Owen | Space 66 | Creative Director |
In many ways, our voices are what make us human. For most patients losing the voice is particularly difficult as it’s such an integral part of one’s personality. Project Revoice gives people with ALS the ability to speak freely and naturally in their own voice, even after they can’t physically speak. To launch the program, we recreated the voice of Pat Quinn, who co-founded the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge while fighting the disease himself. Since Pat hadn’t backed up his voice in any way, we rebuilt his voice using audio data from Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online. Going forward, this program will change how people live with ALS, allowing them to keep communicating as themselves, rather than through a proxy machine voice or a limited set of pre-recorded phrases.
To rebuild Pat’s voice we had to create a data bank of audio for the algorithm to work with. Since Pat hadn’t banked any audio himself, our challenge was to build a sufficient data bank from old Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online. In a sense, it was only because Pat gave the ALS community a voice through the Ice Bucket Challenge that we were able to give him his own voice back. After sourcing over 100 individual files of varying quality, we manually analyzed, cleaned up and transcribed every usable section to create a unified data bank for the algorithm to work with. Once the voice had been cloned through Lyrebird technology, we built a custom user interface for Pat to access the voice through his eye-tracking computer. In March 2018, surrounded by his family and friends Pat was finally able to speak again in his own voice, after over a year in silence. This emotional moment became the heart of our launch campaign, which started in our owned channels only but quickly spread through social conversations and earned media, primarily in US, Canada, UK and Australian markets. To make this technology available to the wider ALS community, Project Revoice has built an online voice bank where ALS sufferers can easily record the voice material necessary for their own voice clones. By the end of 2018 these recordings will be used to create more ‘Revoices’, which users can access and ‘speak’ with through the website or a custom API, via their own Assisted/Augmentative Communication (AAC) devices.