Execution

Nov 2016: Conceptual development began in collaboration with the ALS Association Dec 2016: Research into various forms of voice cloning technology Jul 2017: Partnered with technology company Lyrebird Aug 2017: Decision was made that Pat Quinn, co-founder of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, would be the launch voice for the program. Aug-Oct 2017: Gathering and cleaning up audio data from Pat Quinn’s Ice Bucket Interviews Nov 2017 – Jan 2018: Cloning process of Pat’s voice data, building backend system for integration with his eye-tracking device. Mar 2018: Pat uses his Revoice for the first time. April 2018: Project Revoice launches with Pat’s story. Mid-2018: Online voice bank launches, allowing ALS sufferers to easily bank their voices for future cloning. End of 2018: Project Revoice becomes available to all English-speaking ALS sufferers worldwide.

The Campaign

With a custom machine learning algorithm that analyses and completely recreates a person’s voice, Project Revoice gives ALS patients the full use of their own authentic voices, allowing them to speak freely and naturally even after they physically can’t. To launch the program, we managed to recreate the voice of Pat Quinn, who co-founded the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge while fighting the disease himself. Since Pat hadn’t banked any audio, our challenge was to build a sufficient data bank ourselves from old Ice Bucket interviews and speeches found online. 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.

Creative Execution

Project Revoice is powered by a custom machine learning algorithm that can analyze the unique characteristics (or DNA) of a voice – including tone, pitch and inflections. With only 2-3 hours of transcribed audio as raw material, this technology is able to create a complete digital voice clone that’s able to say anything in real-time via text input. 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.

Project Revoice represents a major improvement in life quality for people with ALS. While the technology is currently limited to English-speaking patients only, the ultimate goal of the program is to prevent anyone diagnosed with ALS from losing their voice. 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. Over 900 million earned media reach Over one million organic video views in the first week. By week two over 41 million people had posted, commented shared or mentioned the campaign. Over 680 articles written globally $9.8 million estimated earned PR value. Over 500 patients joined the program in the first month alone.. On average, 105 people a week are diagnosed with ALS in the United States.

Project Revoice uses a unique deep learning algorithm to analyze the DNA of a person’s voice and create a complete digital voice clone. When integrated with text-to-speech devices, this gives people with ALS the ability to speak freely and naturally in their own voice, even after they lose it. We launched this life-changing program by recreating the voice of Pat Quinn, ALS sufferer and co-founder of the Ice Bucket Challenge, using a few old interviews and speeches as raw material. We then integrated Pat’s Revoice with his eye-tracking computer and captured the moment when he finally spoke again.