His daughter barely remembered what his voice sounded like. He wanted her to hear it again. Living with ALS had made his speech difficult to understand, but he still had jokes to tell and opinions he wanted to put into his own words. In a research recording, he uses an experimental speech system to tease one of the people who built it. The joke is his. So is the decision about when the room gets to hear it.
The system picks up brain activity as he tries to speak. Words appear on a screen, where he can use his gaze to correct them before a loudspeaker reads them in a voice made to sound like his own. At home, a trained care partner helps set up the equipment. In conversation there is no answer sheet, so the researchers asked the person who knew what he meant to say: how often did the machine get it right? His answer tells us more about an ordinary family exchange than a score on a test sentence alone. The article follows this one participant’s experience and looks at communication tools people can use today while implanted speech systems are still being studied.