How Voice Tech Helped Phil Speak Again With ALS (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The idea is that always, you know, it's advertised a lot as if it isn't.

[00:00:06] Speaker 2: My name is Phil, and I work for Bloomberg, as I have done for the last 19 years, doing many roles such as manager and team leader. Currently, I am a software developer in an application infrastructure team.

[00:00:23] Speaker 1: I'm trying to decouple the serialization from the usage.

[00:00:28] Speaker 2: I find work is a blessing.

[00:00:29] Speaker 1: Documentation.

[00:00:31] Speaker 2: My team are amazing.

[00:00:34] Speaker 1: I feel like I really like it for everything else.

[00:00:37] Speaker 2: It's great to keep being productive. I noticed something funny, August 2020. Something very slight. I did an online sermon at church in January or February 2021 that didn't go well.

[00:01:02] Speaker 1: I sounded drunk.

[00:01:04] Speaker 2: I was diagnosed with MND, called ALS, in America in August 2021, when my speech started to slur. I can't speak anymore, and I have lost my ability to walk or move my limbs and hands. I am blessed to have a great wife, Louise, and a wonderful family with three grown-up children. My daughter, Ella, started playing chess with me recently. We enjoy it when she beats me.

[00:01:36] Speaker 3: It's your move.

[00:01:46] Speaker 2: Kill your rook with my bishop.

[00:01:49] Speaker 3: Me and my dad, I remember the drives we would go together. We would go on little road trips, maybe just half an hour, around the local area just to chat. That was one of the ways we would hang out, and we would put a Coldplay album on, or a Radiohead album. I remember he would just explain different things to me. I remember asking him how Bluetooth worked, and he spent the entire drive explaining it to me. How electricity works and all these things, and I think it was actually because of him that I went on to study engineering, because that's what he did. I think he's definitely been a huge inspiration for why I do the things I do, and kind of who I am. I think we're very similar.

[00:02:43] Speaker 2: I'm used to seeing things from above.

[00:02:46] Speaker 3: You can take the move back. I'll allow it. That means you have to let me take a move back when I make a mistake. This is the time when we take the communion.

[00:03:14] Speaker 2: Since my diagnosis, I've used other kinds of voice technology to lead Bible talks in my home and do public speaking in church. That was an emotional experience, but that voice still sounded a bit synthetic and unclear. We were able to use old sermons I recorded in lockdown to create my Eleven Labs voice.

[00:03:36] Speaker 1: This time we're going to be looking at some scriptures together.

[00:03:40] Speaker 3: Gratitude is an incredibly important quality.

[00:03:44] Speaker 2: When we heard it for the first time, we burst into tears as we felt that my voice was finally back. I was blown away. It is clear with all the emotion that my voice had before, it sounds just like me.

[00:04:00] Speaker 4: It was totally Phil in the way he pauses, in the way his humour, everything. It was totally him. For me that was incredibly special because he was able to talk to me with his own voice, not just a voice. It was him, it was personal.

[00:04:19] Speaker 3: I'm so glad he has the voice because otherwise I'm scared I wouldn't remember what he sounded like. But instead he has this untouchable part of him still.

[00:04:31] Speaker 2: Life with MND has been a journey. I'm grateful for life. I realise how precious life is as I've seen people in my condition who are not here anymore. I have also seen my inability to do things bring out the best in people around me. I'm really grateful for my wife as she has been incredible caring for me and meeting my needs. It's been tough on my family and we have grown to be more open about our feelings. They responded in different ways to my diagnosis. In time we have come to grips more with this but it's still hard. We just try to take each day as it comes and make the most of the time we have. It's certainly a learning process and I believe overall I'm blessed. I think that God will use this experience to help people. I was very active before and couldn't truly understand what it meant to be sick. But this experience has deepened my empathy for others and given me a greater perspective of life.