MONS, Belgium, June 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Users about to lose the ability to speak with their own voice can now re-create it synthetically, enabling them to keep this essential part of their identity. 

Designed by Acapela Group, leading player in voice solutions, 'My-own-voice' breakthrough service, allowing users diagnosed with conditions leading to speech or language disorders to capture the essence of their voice before losing it, is now available for Italian users.

This ground breaking service enable users living with conditions causing loss or impairment of speech to keep speaking with their own voice rather than using a standard anonymous synthetic voice.

"For decades we have been creating well-known synthetic voices used by visually and speech impaired users. Accessibility issues are very important to Acapela and we work hard to make communication much easier for people with sight, speech and cognitive disabilities," says Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO of Acapela Group. "Since the launch of my-own-voice in December 2014, we have received a tremendous support from the Speech community and we are closely working with users and speech therapists to improve our solution. We are happy to add Italian to the range of the 10 already supported languages."

The recording processs
To allow individuals to capture their own voice, the first challenge for our R&D team was to create an entire, whole new process to enable recordings to be made by non-professional speakers - at their own home or at the speech therapist location- without any help from Acapela linguists, but with the support of the user's speech therapist. Our expert knowledge had to be harnessed to an end user approach. It has worked out well. We have already run over 80 voice recordings with users about to lose their voice. We have created the foundation for major progress for speech impaired people and we are working on improving methodology and tools to take this vital work forward.

Meet Eric and Garmt, the pioneers of 'my-own-voice'
Eric and Garmt have both been diagnosed with ALS. They have decided to create their own synthetic voice and have participated as pioneers on the first 'my-own-voice' experiences. See Videos, user testimonies, voice samples and useful links here:  http://www.acapela-group.com/meet-eric-and-garmt-my-own-voice-users/

Text-to-speech literally transforms any written input into an audio result. It means that 'my-own-voice', based on the recordings of a corpus of various texts, will be capable of speaking any text, as any synthetic voice can do.

The my-own-voice website fully guides the user and the speech therapist through the full process, based on everyday materials and adapted to those without any specific knowledge of speech technology. As proof of our commitment and strong belief in this project, your synthetic voice with my-own-voice is free to create at an initial stage. A charge will be made only if the user is happy and comfortable with their synthetic voice and wants personal unlimited use (android or windows versions).
More information about my-own-voice: http://www.acapela-group.com/voices/voice-replacement/

About Acapela Group:

We invent speech solutions to vocalize any written content with authentic and original voices that express meaning and intent. Over 100 synthetic voices in 34 languages are ready to give a voice to any content producing a natural and pleasant audio result, by turning written input into speech.

Acapela Group is a bespoke player in speech solutions. For decades we have been creating well known synthetic voices used by visually impaired users. Accessibility issues are very important to Acapela and we work hard to make communication much easier for people with sight, speech and cognitive disabilities. http://www.acapela-group.com

SOURCE Acapela Group