Thiis naturally caught my eye yesterday afternoon, althoughh I can’t find a link to it now. It’s about a new type of voice for communication aids, one modelled on a real voice. It was created by a guy who has motor-neurone disease, and who wants to be able to keep speaking to his son using his own voice. He recorded something like 2000 sentences, which are then broken down into their constituent chunks so the sounds can be used to create new sentences. It’s quite touching really, but it strikes me that we VOCA users could do with something like that too. Although voice synthesisers are improving, I have long wished for a more natural sounding voice. Quite an obvious idea occurred to me. What if we got actors to record the voice – actors like Daniel Craig, Judi Dench or Patrick Stewart? How awesome would that be? Mind you, I’d be forever asking my PA for ”Tea, earl grey, hot.”