Experimental Tech Restores Roger Ebert's Voice

March 2, 2010— -- After a more than three-year journey to find his voice, new technology is helping Roger Ebert sound like himself again.

On "The Oprah Winfrey Show" today, the celebrated film critic, who lost his voice after complications from thyroid cancer, demonstrated new voice cloning technology that will let him communicate in his old voice.

Using hours of archived recordings of Ebert's "At the Movies" commentary, the Scotland-based company CereProc reconstructed the sound of the critic's voice. Ebert himself found the company while searching the Internet and reached out to them last year.

CereProc, an advanced voice synthesis company in Edinburgh, creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.

After demonstrating the technology on Oprah, Ebert gave his new voice the thumbs up.

"You'll know it's a computer, but one that sounds like me," he said. "It still needs improvement but at least it sounds like me. In first grade they said I talked too much, and now I still can."

Moved by the sound of a voice she said she had not heard since July 1, 2006, Ebert's wife Chaz said, "I actually think it's incredible. It's incredible that that's your voice."

Ebert used a prototype for Winfrey's show and expects to receive a final version of the technology in the next few months.

Ebert said the new voice is "uncanny, a good feeling."

Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, but at the time neither he nor his doctors expected him to lose his voice.

The cancer spread to his throat, and attempts to treat the spreading cancer with radiation led to more complications. Several subsequent surgeries meant to restore his voice failed.

In the effort to communicate again through speech, his new "voice" went through several incarnations before settling on the CereProc technology.

In a piece published last August on his journal on the Chicago Sun-Times' Web site, Ebert wrote about his experiments with text-to-speech technology. On his Mac, he said he found a speech program that reads aloud messages typed on his laptop.

Though he called it a "godsend," he said it still left much to be desired. He tested out different voices and, after using a British accented voice called "Lawrence" for a year, he ultimately settled on "Alex."

"Amazingly Alex, is the first voice I have yet heard that understands and reflects question marks and exclamation points!?! This prevents every sentence from being spoken in a monotone," Ebert wrote.