That is incredible. The very best of luck to you sir. You are an inspiration.

I love the volume and quality of your writing on this blog and your SunTimes webpage. One thing I dearly miss are your hilarious and engaging apperances on the Howard Stern radio show. I've listened to your final apperances many times, and always hoped for some sort of voice software breakthrough that would allow you to attempt another shot on the radio. I always thought it would be a worthy experiment.

Here's hoping that apperance may happen one of these years.

What an incredible find! For some reason, this entire post put a smile on my face. Whatever does happen, I think what you do with the written word alone inspires me.

Running old leftist protest songs through the Bush-O-Matic is the most fun I've had all day. Solidarity Forever!

Best of luck, Mr. Ebert. Many of your posts make me think; this one makes me grateful. Besides all the practical issues (replying in a timely manner, etc.), this made me realize that my voice is a part of being me, almost as much as the words themselves. I hope you're able to reclaim yours.

I'm greatly cheered too! This would be wonderful if it works as well as their demos suggest.

I can imagine your frustration. I went without speech myself for about year. However, in my case it wasn't a total loss of function. It just took a painful effort to force out the words.

I always enjoyed your conversation style. Some people meander around aimlessly lost in their own words. They back up, go forward, turn left and right, get frustrated, give up. Basically they speak like a Rhode Islander driving an English car in Mumbai traffic. Know what I mean? The situation is in charge and not the driver. But that wasn't you. You went from point to point like a seasoned tour guide and took us along with you. If I thought you were about to hit a roadblock, you'd dart down a hidden alley and emerge in a wonderful cobblestone square. "Have you seen this? How about that? You should really consider this other vista we're going to now, but let's not dilly-dally, I could use a beer and some bangers n' mash, step lively troop, The Spaniards awaits!". Yes, you were wonderfully sure in your voice. I have to selfishly say that I miss it too.

Now when you do find a suitable computer voice, I would love to hear you again on a DVD commentary track. I think this would be great. Even if the first draft isn't perfect, I wonder if those people at Cereproc could add a certain amount of inflection and tone to sort of shape your track to be a perfect match with your already known voice. Certainly this would be easier than an 'on the fly' translation from your laptop to listener. Perhaps some audiophile genius at UofChicago is just waiting for a thesis project. But now I'm sounding selfish. Your future voice is for your enjoyment, and I hope that one day soon, you find it again.

Dearest Roger, (I say that with the utmost sincerity, as you are very dear to me.)

I have never met you, but you have without knowing it, been a friend to me for many, many years.

I can't remember a time when you were not a part of my life. I grew up watching you and Gene, and was heartbroken when you were no longer able to do the TV show with Richard. I hoped and prayed (well, I didn't really pray, just in a secular way) that you would someday return to your rightful place on television. I can honestly say that you are the primary reason I love films so much. I have read many of your books, and I return to them time and time again.

This most recent article of yours regarding a synthesized voice has finally prompted me to send you my greetings. I was just having a 3-person conversation on Facebook about synchronicity, or strange coincidences. I was in the midst of a David Attenborough marathon on DVD when an old friend of mine posted a clip from one of his nature specials. I had not mentioned to this friend that I was watching these DVDs, and yet here was this clip she had posted. That was the first of several weird coincidences that occurred over a course of a few weeks.

The reason I mention this is because just last week, upon hearing of the demise of the horrible two Bens on At the Movies (Finally! Hurray!), I was talking to my partner about how I had missed hearing you speak and that I wished there was a way for you to do so once again. I grieved for the loss of your voice. I was sad that I would never hear another DVD commentary from you. I imagined a time when you could regain your voice, and in my hope of hopes, reclaim your rightful place back in that aisle seat at the movies.

After reading your article today, I know that regaining your voice will soon become a reality, and I can't tell you how overjoyed I was to read this. I know it will happen, and I relish the day you can do another commentary, TV show, or whatever your heart desires with your new voice, and I in turn will be able to once again have that friend in my ear to stimulate my film-hungry mind. It is a mind that is not often stimulated, as my only other film-freak friend moved to New Zealand many years ago and we lost touch. Film is so important to me. I spend countless hours scanning Netflix for something new and exciting, and always click over to your review of a film before I make my final decision.

I know this is a very gushy letter, but I assure you it is sincere. Roger, I just want you to know that you will once again have that voice, and once again it will be magnificent.

You will remain in my thoughts and I look forward to the day when I, and the rest of the world, will hear you speak once again.

Take care, keeping fighting, and good luck! I can't wait!

Warmest regards,
John Schultze
Bloomfield, NJ

Ebert: Those are very kind words.

Hi Roger,

Serious part of the comment: I wish you the best, my friend. I'm still hopeful that you'll restart teaching soon. Hook up your Mac to an overhead projector, and type away!

Lighthearted part of the comment: I went to that George W. Bush site and aside from doing the usual goofy stuff -- entering my name, various samples of gibberish, etc. -- I decided to paste in a clip from one of his speeches, and it sounded just like him. Then, I pasted in a clip from an Obama speech. Might just be my perception, but it didn't sound right.

I would like to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger do Darth Vader lines. No Luke Ayyam yo faada! Speaking of that, have you any thoughts about inserting heavy Darth Vader breathing sounds in your conversations?

But, back to seriousness, I wish you the best.

Omer M

Ebert: I'm not ruling it out.

As you're currently enjoying the dulcet tones of Alex on your Mac, you also may be interested in the program Textcast, which will allow you to generate any of your writings into a Podcast using Alex's voice.

http://www.bitmaki.com/textcast/

You can post this blog as a downloadable file for our iPods...

Or we could spring for the $25 and do it ourselves?

Ebert: I have downloaded it and you have my thanks!

I had a feeling if I posted this entry, I'd get some useful advice.

Language is all, isn't it? Imagine being deaf and mute. Now compare it to blindness. Certainly both are horrendously debilitating, but the blind have their facility with language intact, aside from the written word, and the deaf are in their own universe.

Of course you know all this better than anyone. I can speak and hear, but unlike Mr. Ed, find myself often squaundering those abilities by jumping in when I have nothing to say. I am an old radio jock so of course I am in love with my own voice. Your current situation touches me, scares me. You face it with great courage and much-to-be-admired outrage and I respect you for it.

I don't think you'll find the answer in technology. It will never express the subtleties and nuances that make language fun. But rest assured, we all hear your voice when we read your words. There's some comfort in that, I hope.

Roger,

I haven't heard you speak since an appearance on The Howard Stern Show many years ago. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I am a writer. Aside from fact-based reporting reporting (which, sad to say, is a dying art), writing in both short- and long-form will have a unique voice to it.

I'm sure I can show you any page of any Cormac McCarthy novel and you would recognize his voice.

Your writing has a voice, it is clear, intelligent, and witty when you want it to be. I have enjoyed reading your reviews for many years, and I'm glad I started following your blog. I look forward to your voice continuing to enlighten and entertain me in the future.

Roger, just a small correction: you upgraded to Leopard on the Mac. Not Snow Leopard--that one isn't out yet. The Alex voice was introduced with Leopard.

I'm still surprised that, with all the recordings of your voice around from years of doing the TV show, it hasn't become a university project to put together a voice for you from those archives. Contact your academic connections and see if you can't find a professor and a willing student or group of students.

Also, I stopped watching your TV show shortly after Gene passed away, so I haven't heard your "voice" in a long time. But I read your reviews and your blog religiously, so I "hear" it all the time. But I understand your problem is with interpersonal conversations. You're communicating now, through your reviews and the blog, with a far larger audience than you did before.

I wish you the best in finding software that faithfully replicates your own voice. This might not serve as any consolation, but I feel like I can hear your voice through your writing. Then again, this might just a reflection of having seen your show too many times.

I think part of the problem is a lack of empathy to people who are struggling with communication impediments. This is not out of malice, rather because of inexperience with people who have a difficult time expressing themselves or understanding others. I had a remarkable Economics professor in graduate school who was blind, but still taught Ph.D. level microeconomics courses. He was capable of mentally computing and reciting insane calculus, and I often saw him in his office relying on his research assistant to read things from his computer that could not be interpreted by software. Sure, I resent the guy for giving me a [well-deserved] C in that course, but I could not imagine how frustrating it must be to have such a brilliant mind and lack independence with information. Now I work for a government agency that deals with statistics, and whenever we try to produce a new data visualization product, we have to make sure that adheres to Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates accessibility of electronic information. Unfortunately, most federal employees see these requirements as a hindrance to accomplishing their goals because they can't visualize anyone benefiting from the extra work this entails in their project I hope that your blog post reminds people that accessibility problems could happen to everyone, and that no costs should be measured to ensure that people can get their thoughts across.

Dear Roger,

It is a shame that speech synthesis is so difficult. Unfortunately, I doesn't seem to be progressing with the rest of the computer world. We have computers that can beat grand masters at chess, computers that can predict the weather with good accuracy, and computers that let the operator know when they're about to break, but no computers that can talk well. Of course, there are many obvious problems with speech synthesis. You must have an extensive library of consonant and vowel sounds at different frequencies, or modulate the sounds in real time (it sounds fake if you do that). Alex is the most real voice because he takes advantages of the resources available to modern computer users. We have enough disk space that we can have a voice like that. Since you have quite an understandable interest in the subject, you should check out texttospeechblog.com. It provides updates on the technology.

Your Avid Reader,
Nathan

Roger, I see you've already gotten some helpful suggestions in the first dozen comments.
I have to hope that some smarty-pants computer science and linguistics folks will read this and make getting Roger Ebert his voice back their mission.
I think there should be a grant given out for that! I think it would better serve society than what some academics get grants for...

As with all your loyal readers, I hope you a successful outcome with CereProc. Yet the ultimate answer may rest closer to home, with the very wizards you mentioned at your Alma mater.

I have been following with great interest the development of Blue Waters, which will soon become operational at the University of Illinois. Mr. Langley would be proud; in fact, I prefer to think of it as HAL 2011. This mind boggling super computer will able to sustain calculating speeds of 1000 trillion operations(flops) per second, whatever the hell that means. The Gandolf of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications you visited, Dr. Thomas Dunning, described these petascale (monolithic) clusters as 'roughly equivalent to having a million laptops, all miraculously working on the same problem at exactly the same time.' Dr. Dunning further talked of the potential for much better "weather modeling." My fervent hope is that the upcoming work to be done there, at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary's Road, will give us the ability to better understand and assess the actual potential for future catastrophic climate change. We'll see. Can't wait till it's up and running.

Anyhow I would like to remind you how eloquently you have been speaking to folks worldwide through your Journal. No truer confirmation of this is the staggering 759 responses you have received to date(last 5 days) in your last entry. Patience, kind sir, help is surely close at hand.

I can feel it.

Ebert: I once went on a class trip to see Illiac, the early U of Illinois computer that, in my memory anyway, essentially consisted of a building filled with vacuum tubes.

Sidebar conversations at Ebertfest this year included a lot of speculation on this very issue -- why can't someone go through old S&E shows and grab voice samples to give you your real voice back? It's good to finally know the answer, and hopefully, someone will figure it out soon.

We do miss your wit and wisdom during the post-film interviews, as well as your ability to manage an interview. I can see how multiple people jumping into a conversation can make it klunky to respond via computer voice, but have you considered trying a one-on-one interview in front of the audience? It might be worth a shot. Especially in front of a forgiving audience.

And if they ever develop the techonology, I'd be happy to lend you my voicebox on occasion, as long as you promise to use it for good rather than evil (for example, you could yell at my kids when they misbehave or tell my wife how pretty she is).

Ebert: All that surgery could be tricky, as we swapped back and forth.

Being blessed with a moderate form of Beethoven's Problem, I understand how important speech/hearing is to inter humanness even more possibly than vision. A line of Nichiren Daishonin's writings says "Voice does the Buddha's work." and all traditional Buddhist Sutras start with the sentence "Thus I heard". But then since life itself is ephemeral, so are all the appurtenances thereof, so wisdom dictates(not me I'm a novice meself) not to be too attached to fame, fortune, learning, talent and rather than lamenting what one don't have or lost to drink the cup to the bottom o' ze last drop. I had a single eye for last quarter century which kept me from drivin' anything among other minor irritants (like missing the cup when putting a spoon o' sugar) but I never gave it a second thought beyond coping the needful. Like you , or shall we say unlike you the study of hearing aids from cost/benefit viewpoint has become an interesting pastime.

"Those who face adversity with hope and the willingness to try their very best don't consider the process painful. People who exert themselves to the fullest and tackle each problem as it arises don't really experience hardships as such; they instead see everything as a joyful challenge. ."..Daisaku Ikeda

and again:

Learning, genius, power, wealth, reputation, science, technology --- all become nothing when one is confronted by death. Faced with his end, man finds himself hopelessly overpowered.... That article and numerous other similar stories make us realize all the more clearly the significance of the phrase, "My sole wish has therefore been to solve this eternal mystery. All else has been secondary." Buddhism holds the answers to the questions man has struggled with since his beginning, the questions of death and the last moment of life. Buddhism is the philosophy of how to live, and every one of us, being human and existing as "beings-unto-death," should study it with equal zeal...Daisaku Ikeda

Au revoir for a coupla'..

I am reminded of the multiple times I ended up screaming BLUE!!! at my Nintendo DS while playing Brain Age and the game methodically answering "that is incorrect" while clearly, I was more than correct – I was correct ten times in a row, and that damn microphone/program couldn't pick up my pronunciation.

I was thinking about voice programming the other day, and I think it's exceptionally difficult to program voices because there are hundreds of thousands of different tonal subtleties that boil down to individual idiosyncracy, a conglomeration of social and cultural upbringing and exposure.

This kind of project is the bane of programmers. Not that there aren't programmers out there willing to do the brunt of work – which is something of a noble cause, definitely – but really, there are just too many factors to account for in voices, nonetheless the microphones for recording, the vocabulary, the language etc... it's a pain.

But I'm glad there's a company out there for you. Hopefully they'll expand their horizons soon!

Ebert: I'm not expecting perfection.

Hola Roger.
Just want to wish you the best of luck. Keep up the good fight.

and they make it seem so easy on the M.I. movies.

I enjoyed making George Bush confess to his crimes. Maybe in certain circumstances using his voice might be a good way to get peoples attention.

I really hope they consider offering you a complimentary voice! It'd be great PR for them, that's for sure.

Reply to: Why can't I have a voice of my own? Many people don't happen to have a lot of recordings of themselves speaking.

Which is why most of the engineering has been in translating words into speech.

Reply to: a lot of recordings of themselves speaking. I have countless hours. All the old TV shows have been digitized. I've done several DVD commentaries. There are lectures, panel discussions, Q&A sessions.

It takes years and years for a child to learn how to speak. If you want to reach that level again, maybe...

http://www.dell.com/tablet?s=biz&cs=555

What if you started with a Tablet PC? Mac doesn't have one yet, but the rumors say they're close. As close as 2010.

"We expect the tablet hardware to be similar to an iPod touch, but larger," Munster said, adding that an Apple tablet device will probably cost around $600, placing it between the highest-end iPod touch at $399 and the MacBook, which starts at $999.

http://www.rentourlaptops.com/images/tablet-pc.jpg

Let's start with an existing Tablet PC already on the market, and imagine how much better the Apple version will be when it arrives:

Dell Latitude XT specs as reviewed (price as tested $3,640)

http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=1116

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.2GHz ULV U7600 processor

12.1" WXGA (1280 x 800) LED backlit Dual input digitizer

N-trig touchscreen technology

The Dell Latitude XT2 tablet provides intuitive input capabilities including a capacitive multi-touch screen and pen. With just a stroke of your fingertips, you can scroll through large web pages... With natural gestures like pinching or tapping you can quickly and easily scroll, pan, rotate, enlarge and reduce content.

With multi-touch gesturing, the touch-screen responds to more than one finger contact. The multi-fingertip movement conveys a command for actions such as
Pinch zoom in & out,
Two-finger Pan/scroll,(end)

Then, go through the recordings of your voice, and break them down into sentences. Let's say three hundred. Put a list of all of them on the screen. After a few weeks, you'll be familiar with each location, and able to find the right ones quickly.

Instead of generating an individual word, play the entire sentence of your recorded voice.

That would have to be faster (eventually) than writing or typing out entire sentences.

The voice has a deep connection to our spiritual essence, and I wish you the best in your quest. As proof of this, I offer Whitman:

"I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones,
elder, mullein and poke-weed."

Ebert: From time to time someone will quote Whitman here, and it always compels me to take down the book and read a little. I sometimes think certain writers create prose as pure as running water.

I really hope this works out for you. It would be great to hear from you again!

Dear Roger,

first of all, let me thank you for your wonderfull style of writing and analyzing the movies.
You work has always been favourable for me.

After reading your blog entry, I must do some researching for you.
I remembered a solid German company called Linguatec (I`m from Germany ;-)) who is specialiazed in Voice Reading Software, I found the online demo pretty good already - perhaps you want to check it out:

http://www.linguatec.de/products/tts/voice_reader/vrs?adtrack=vrdemo2

There are a few more, that you might have not checked-out:

http://www.naturalreaders.com/

Free one: http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php (I just found that this open source tool allows you to create your own voice: http://freetts.sourceforge.net/tools/FestVoxToFreeTTS/README.html

More to follow on this, after the break ;-)

Cheers & wish you all the best from Frankfurt
Markus

I wish you the very best, I am sorry I know nothing of this subject and am not able to help you, but know that reading your situation is motivating to me, and that I look forward to your post weekly.

Actually, you don't even need any special software to turn text (or even whole webpages) into MP3 files. You can do it for free in Automator.

Create a new workflow, and add the following three Actions, in this order:

1) Get current webpage from Safari.
2) Get text from webpage.
3) Text to audio file.

(You can locate these Actions by just typing the first few words in the window's search box. Just drag each one from the library to the right-half of the window.)

And that's really it. There are options (what voice, where to save the file) that you can easily figure out. Point Safari to a webpage, click the "Play" button on this workflow, and after some percolation, you'll have an .AIFF file, made to order.

For convenience, go to the File menu and choose "Save As Plug-In" and choose "Script Menu" next to "Plug-in for." The workflow will appear in the menubar under the Applescript menu (the one that looks like a little S-shaped scroll).

You can also build up from there...add another action that adds the audio file to iTunes, for instance. Or use another Action to feed the text into "Text to audio file"...like "Get contents of TextEdit document." This substitution will turn the frontmost TE document into a spoken audio file.

For what it's worth, your notes only take a minute or two to get used to. And I think it only took me another 90 seconds to think "Andy, you dumbass: Roger's not deaf. Talk NORMAL!"

I think the big change in my conversational style with you in person is that I tend to speak a few lines and then wait for you to write a few lines in response.

Hey Roger,

They have been saying that realistic and accurate speech-to-type and type-to-speech was about 5 years off for as long as I've been using computers. I wish they'd actually make it happen. I wonder if public interest just waned or if it is that technically hard. If the minds at Google or other top companies actually wanted to get this done, we'd have it. Of course, then you'd have to put up with verbal adsense ads in-between your paragraphs.

I am positive you already know about this, but IP Relay can be useful for phone calls. It's actually made for those who cannot speak for whatever reason, though is mostly abused by bored teenagers.

I sincerely wish you the best though. I've been a reader for many years, and can attribute much of my choice to get a Journalism/Film Studies degree and start my movie site to the way that I felt when I saw many of the movies you recommend. Even if you sound like Alex, I'd be the first to download an Ebert podcast.

(Side note: I actually just listened to your Citizen Kane commentary on the DVD a couple weeks back. Great work.)

RE: I'm not expecting perfection.

Perfection's overrated anyways.

(Programming is still a pain though)

Voice recognition and voice patterns have come a ways since I remember following their development. Originally it was an interesting toy in itself, but it's becoming more intelligible, and more like actual human speech.

I remember one of the problems was that the exclamation point and question mark were the only way to get it to inflect, and even then it didn't register so well. The question mark had it raise the tone of the last word, but it sounded more like a Valley Girl than a question.

Tooling with some of the voices lately, I found that the stuff that once cost a bundle is now free, and the next range of stuff is more advanced but still costs. I'm betting that your email probe will return with a bunch of big "£" signs attached. But it seems that there is a steady stream of development in this field.

It may not be right away, but you can be sure they'll develop a way to capture voices. Right now, what they'll probably try to do is pick up on specific idiosyncrasies by hand and graft it on to an existing algorithm, nudging numbers left and right. So, there's no wonder why they're so expensive.

Why not try out a woman's voice while you're waiting? You know how commanding they can be :)

He speaks no longer
with his tongue, but through his hands,
his heart, his desire.

The still'd tongue does not
a conversation end, so
long as wit remains.

There once was a man named Roger E,
whose voice sadly dimmed from some surgery.
But, though his throat was unsound,
his words were unbound,
by the gift of astounding computery.

Very interesting post- thanks. We're just starting the process of getting an assistive communication device for my autistic son, and I hadn't even thought about the actual "speech" part yet. Thanks for the information.

I must say I do like Leonard. After making him read a few verses from Yeats, I tried the opening stanza from Spinal Tap's "Bog Bottom." Works wonders.

All the best in finding the right software.

Just as I pressed the SUBMIT button on my previous entry, I realised I had made a typo and, instead of "Big Bottom," typed in "Bog Bottom." Lawrence took a crack at Sinal Tap's "Big Bottom," not "Bog Bottom." "Bog Bottom" is what my friends call me.

I laughed, happy for you, over your relief to be rude again.

Roger,

I wish you luck in finding what you need.

Have you been in contact with the folks at British Telecom who commissioned "Tom Baker Says", which is a service that reads SMS messages to customers in the voice of actor Tom Baker? It's possible that the same technology could be used with phonemes from the archives of your many hours of recordings.

http://tombakersays.com/

There was an episode of Scientific American on PBS some years ago where they built a computer version of Alan Alda's voice, and even synchronized it to a 3D scan and texture-mapped model of his head. The transcript is available here, and I think there's also a video link.

I'm curious: I am sure you are a world class typist, but assuming you could get the voice right, does typing become the determinant of response time, etc? I worked with a blind man who could 'listen' much faster than people read, by speeding up the track to a point where the voice sounded like a chipmunk auctioneer on meth. But I am totally unfamiliar with how typing speed compares to spoken output.

Must say I'm surprised that this problem has not been solved for you already...with virtual reality videogames and laptops soon to not be in a lap, but projected from a pen, you'd think a customized computer voice should be apple pie?

It needs to be said though, that your writing is as clear and sharp as ever. I recall that you wrote an entry about feeling the expansion in your writing vigor post-surgery. In a way I imagine that it's both a blessing and a curse...to be forced to channel your creativity through one conduit albeit colorfully while being restricted in another. Please rest assured that though the medium has changed, the source of that wit and ingenuity hasn't been lost. Your voice is heard loud and clear worldwide. Those that can't hear it are probably busy watching GI Joe and thus need not worry anyway.

P.s. Re CereProc's prices...if you are open to it, I personally would be happy to contribute to the cause, as I'm sure others would as well.

What does Stephen Hawking use? It is robotic to be certain, but he isn't typing what he says, so where do the words originate? I am sure it's frustrating trying to keep up with a spoken conversation while typing, simply IMing with two others is hard enough. Today's youth would not be quite as hindered as yourself, they can type conversation far quicker than we ever could.

On the bright side, I would imagine the type of voice-creation you speak of isn't far off. And at the risk of telling you what to do with your money, why not send M.I.T. a chunk of change to start such a program. They design it, you own it. You get your solution, they get an education, and others in need of such a service get help as well. Just a thought. And think of the money in it for celebrities! Sean Connery's voice would be my choice, though occasions would dictate Elmer Fudd.

Thank you; it's always fun and nourishing to read you.

If you are in New York in October, Robert Lepage's play "Lipsynch" is on for a series of performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music. It is a captivating and heart-breaking meditation on intimacy, recordings, and the pursuit of lost voices. I saw two performances at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in June (nine hours each, with five intermissions); it's the finest theatre I've seen here.

Three recent and variously lovely treatments of the voice I know from my dissertation work are Mladen Dolar's "A voice and nothing more," Adriana Cavarero's "For more than one voice: towards a philosophy of vocal expression," and Jacob Smith's "Vocal tracks." Cavarero, especially, offers a rich bundle of readings (of the balcony scene in "Romeo & Juliet," of "siren" stories, and a great Calvino story called "A king listens"). Smith is a lot of fun, too, writing about how recording and microphone technologies stimulated new singing and acting styles and genres (crooning, fireside chats, the Method, candid camera).

Best wishes, and thanks.

Seriously, if you should decide to go back to TV, even under these conditions and with whatever voice, I would surely tune in every week.

Roger, I wish you the best. Your writing remains interesting, informative, and a joy to read, so at least you are communicating and we are listening. The voice will come next---a programmer with a sense of humor may give you Siskel's instead of your own.

And, of course, it is Lawrence that I like, and not Leonard. It's because I'd heard Lawrence during your interview with Leonard Maltin is why I must have mixed up the two.

Roger, like a zillion other people I loved the sound of your voice. And the YouTube of you and Gene fooling around before the show is just plain memorable. And I think tracheotomies are barbaric -- as barbaric for you as Florence Joyner losing a leg.

Plus, there's no gizmo in the world that's going to substitute for spontaneous speech, even with meticulous samples from your shows, as SM Rana suggested -- which would take years to catalogue and make decisions about pitch and affectation and tone and volume to proxy a thought that took a millisecond to think. If I were you, I wouldn't spend much time fooling around with that novelty, as clever as you can be. You could be as clever as Harpo Marx with a honk-horn and burden yourself much less (I've done a lot of music workstation programming; it never gets easier and the sounds grow stale long before the melodies do).

I've been a religious reader of Ebert reviews for years. You are the best, yes or no.

But I NEVER knew you could write as you do now in your blogs. I do wonder if you'd be doing this had you not lost those sonorous, assuring pipes to a medical fiasco.

Your voice, intonations, inflections and pitches and emotional intent come out on your blog loud and clear for me and everybody else "with ears to hear." You couldn't do this on TV, locked into movie criticism as you were.

You're now on an equal footing with every other blogger out there, even with your advantage of celebrity. Still, celebrity isn't going to make anybody keep reading what Britney Spears thinks about anything, for instance.

I love making these noises on your blog, but in person, even my wife complains that I "never talk." That really is how I discern all these wild characters to tell about. Speaking, for me, is a way to keep people going. "Uh huh? Mm hm? Huh! Hmmm..." Once in awhile they need a speech. Catt certainly does, then she tells me I talk too much.

You, me and Meher Baba. It's very instructive to watch how you absorb these posts. So shut up and write, old man. You're going more places than you've so far been. I wanna see. Hmmm or a nod.

On a mildly related subject, I recently saw a "60 Minutes" segment about a man with ALS that had managed to speak by operating a computer with his mind. He could write a sentence by thinking of it (in some time) and then they plugged in the interviewer and he was able to do the same on the first try.

I know your situation is not nearly as dire, but I brought it up because the piece really demonstrated some amazing technology generated entirely by the mind, be it a person who moved her mouse cursor by envisioning the process of moving her own hand as she would a mouse or an immobilized monkey that eventually learned to feed itself by operating a robotic hand with its mind. It all struck me as a modern "Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

I guess I just think that if this miracle can be accomplished for someone in true need, imagine what can be done (maybe in a few years at worst) for someone like you who has just lost their voice.

I hate thinking that when I briefly met you at Ebertfest in April I might have left before you had the chance to respond. Keep making your "voice" heard!

Ebert: That may be a company in Urbana, which has technology to allow those with neurological troubles to guide their wheelchairs. Their software doesn't read your mind so much as pick up subvocalized impulses to the vocal cords. My body lacks the hardware. :)

The great movie critics have always spoken with their own distinct voices, so that even when they gave near-identical reasons for liking or disliking a film it was still possible to distinguish a Pauline Kael from a Stanley Kaufman from a Jack Moffitt. As long as you can write, we will still able to enjoy the sound of your voice.

Roger,

As a computer engineer just near enough to graduation to still feel the optimism and exuberance that students passionate about their field are prone to, I can tell you that we are working on this problem, and we will. It's true that there are uncountable subtleties involved in synthesizing speech, and we may never understand them all, but the nature of computing - and, in truth, the miracle of computing - is that if we can understand the existence of such a subtlety, such a problem, we have overcome the greatest barrier to solving it. We already have marvelous software to achieve voice again, and I believe that CereProc can give you the ability to at least speak and be heard. They seem to have demonstrated the framework necessary to achieve that end already.

I understand that this does not solve the problem of the unavoidable time delay in writing notes. I cannot give you anything that your other thoughtful readers have not, in this regard, except this one little piece of cutting-edge technology.

We will see this sometime in the very near future. We can already control computers with our eyes.

(I believe that technology is something which can turn us all into wide-eyed children again, if only for a moment. This holds true even for an engineer, whose job is often simply to mash his head against the wall until his project works. It can make us all dream, and it can make many - perhaps most - of those dreams come true.)

Like all of your other readers, I wish you nothing but the best. Of all the people I have happened upon who have bared their minds - and sometimes, their souls - to the public, yours is the most understanding, the gentlest, and often times the wisest. I hope reading this has given you at least a glimmer of hope, as you have so often given me hope for a culture which prizes Transformers 2 over Tokyo Story.

I once went an entire day without talking (it was a bet) and was amazed at how frustrated I became with simple things. I'd always thought that losing my sight would be the worst--followed by my hearing, but my one-day "experiment" made me reconsider. Your tone, intonation, timing, volume and so many other aspects of your voice make up a lot of your outward expression of your personality.

This post reminded me of your earlier blog entry on jokes. Without your voice, you really cannot "tell" a joke anymore. You can type the lines, but we all know they won't be funny without the proper delivery--which is only possible through a personal voice. And this has to be very tough for a sarcastic and funny person like yourself. Personally, I it's tough for me to go 15 minutes without a sarcastic zinger of some sort.

I truly wish you the best in finding a better medium through which you can give people the "true" Roger.

Roger,
Those of us who have followed you for years still hear you loud and clear. A parrot can talk but can not express itself. I've never "heard" anyone express themself as eloquently as you do in your writing.

Dear Roger,

I'm another fan who has 'known' you for as long as I can remember. Early in my career I traveled alone 100% of the time, and I'd go to the movies nearly every night, wherever I was. You were my date to all those movies, pointing out what was brilliant, cracking me up with observations of the awful, and above all teaching me to appreciate it like a connoseur. Now I'm 35, settled with a family and all, and I still savor each and every review you write, even though I rarely get to see movies any more.

Reading this thread, it occurs to me that I've always heard your voice in my head as I read your words, so I often forget that you can't speak any longer. In fact, I don't just hear your voice, I hear it layered with sound effects, soundtracks, and sometimes imitating other voices for impact. It seems to me that technology should not only allow you to use your own voice, but also to enrich your own voice, the way that HTML enriches plain text.

I know, you just want to start with your own voice. Best of luck; I have faith it is just a matter of time, and not long at that. I look forward to reading the updates.

Being a singer, the realm of vocal synthesis is one that's always intrigued me, but has more often than not left me wholly unsatisfied. I thank you for bringing these links to everyone's attention, these are beyond anything I've been exposed to before, and have me excited for the field's future. I wish you the best in regaining the your spontaneity through technology.

Roger:

Keep the faith. New breakthroughs in technology occur every day. Synthesized speech customized to the speaker will come. Meanwhile, your literary "voice" comes through loud, clear, complex, nuanced, with a full range of emotions, greatly entertaining and always informative. I refer you to Gutman's speech in The Maltese Falcon that begins, "I enjoy talking to a man who likes to talk. I distrust a closed-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you stay in practice."

Not that I don't cherish the written word (I'm here, right). And only a glance at my walls of fully stocked book shelves also bears my point - but might me "sometime" expect an Ebert Podcast to be available? Or perhaps "voice" reviews on your film site? To "hear" you speak about a film is different (no better, no worse) than reading what you thought of a particular movie. Inflection, emphasis, tone, (sound wise) can now all possibly be thrown back into the full Ebert repertoire.
(Now if only I could see those hovering, circling hands again?)

Ebert: Why would one rather hear a podcast of a computer voice than read the review?

I hope this all works out for you. I saw you speak at the Savannah College of Art and Design several years ago. It reminded me of what an important art form film can be. (Frequently I just watch movies for entertainment.) Perhaps one day computer technology will allow you to resume your scene by scene dissections of Citizen Kane.

Reading this journal post got me thinking about all the long term possibilities.

What do you think about this idea: computer software that could analyze your reviews and opinions - looking for patterns. Then the details of a new film (plot, genre, director, etc.) could be analyzed to determine your probable reaction to the film. That information combined with realistic computer animations and voice simulation could allow you to be on TV reviewing new films forever.

Dear Roger,

Although we've never met, I feel like you've been a constant companion for many years now. Not just on TV/DVD/radio, etc. but also your written word. And as I read your written words,I hear your voice giving me the information I look for in a review. I've never responded to a blog before, but I feel compelled to respond to this one. Just one year ago today, I lost my ability to find the words I needed to express my thoughts. I was an articulate speaker/writer and find this horribly frustrating; and a thesaurus has become my best friend. So I understand a very small bit of your loss and frustration. I kept holding out hope that you would recover your voice, so I wish you good luck in your quest for an electronic version of your own voice. But rest assured, your fans around the world will not stop hearing your voice.

There is no way how I can express to you how deeply I feel about your voice recovery. We all wish to listen to you speak again. There is a an emotional dimension to hearing your thoughts that we all dearly miss. But it's all trivial to how you must miss it so.

My soul goes out to you on this one.

Mr. Ebert kind sir, I just read your review of PONYO and then I read your finding my own voice and it struck me ( I maybe wrong ) the two things they have in common is: dignity and transition. Mr Ebert the Grace within your Spirit Is not definded by words or actions but by the ability to keep going even when you are having one of those days that make you question yourself. Keep searching and Know that you are loved and respected my your wife and family and also my people whom you will never meet.
Respectfully, Robert Harris

Roger,

Some weeks ago, I came across a YouTube interview Leonard Maltin did with you a couple of years ago, during which Lawrence was your voice-of-choice. It was the first time I had heard you speak since your surgeries, and I had previously no idea you were using a synthesizer (aside: I also didn't realize you were just using a Macbook application...I assumed you had spent a bundle on it, since it sounded pretty damn good :)).

Thank you for being public about the new challenges you're facing in life, as it really does provide an inspiration. My dad isn't much of a movie-goer, nor does he really care what critics have to say about the few he does see, but he was immediately familiar with you when he needed to be: last year when he was diagnosed with throat cancer, I cited your triumph as proof that he will be fine (I wasn't too precise with the type of cancer, but I knew you had a cancer of a similar region). He really took it to heart. One year later, he is cancer free and perfectly healthy. Your experience gave me the only instance of the disease I could relate to, and in turn helped him cope by hearing about a success story during his frightened stage.

Good luck finding the right voice. My impersonations aren't particularly good due to my somewhat nasally voice, so a synthesizer might be helpful during a botched attempt at making people laugh. I wish you the best in overcoming the potential frustrations that you've faced.

Take care.

There are some other things you might want to have a look at:

1) We have developed a Mac product called Proloquo, which comes with the Infovox voices (available in many languages and flavors). Additionally it also works with Alex and Cepstral voices and should also work with CereProc voices. This product is designed to use as a communication solution on your Mac with easy drag and drop vocabulary construction so that you can easily build your personalized vocabulary.

2) We recently released a product called Proloquo2Go that provides synthesized speech, easy and flexible communication, in fact a complete communication solution for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Feel free to contact us and we would be glad to help you out.

david, CEO of AssistiveWare

Ebert: Thanks very much. I have bookmarked your site and am downloading your demos.

I do hope an inventor creates a mechanical prostheses that uses air through synthetic cords, or a way to grow the voice organ again from stem cells. Computers would likely play a huge role either way.
I have a close friend who lost his voice through cancer surgery, though he can make understandable sounds it is a terrible handicap.
I enjoyed listening to you, Siskel and the others, banter and argue points regarding a film -- I would hope you were first in line for any such advancement.

Mr. Ebert,

When I heard that At the Movies was getting its next new hosts, I felt a momment of wistful thinking that I could see you and Gene Siskel again reveiwing a new movie.

After reading your post today, I now think about how much of that is tied into voice and realize that I miss hearing you.

I wish this works well for you.

Eric

I hope they respond with some positive news. But although I miss hearing you on television, I feel so very lucky to still have the privilege to read your words. Know that there are many of us who would would wait hours, patiently, just to be able to speak with you no matter what means you used to communicate.
Let us know how it goes!
Cheers,
-Jason

I've always been a fan of your voice -- which was definitively shaped like a thumb in many people's minds for too long. Though I can't imagine your loss, it should serve you well to know -- as thousand continue to point out in this space -- that you haven't been silenced.

Not even a little bit.

You and I don't always agree; movies, politics, or philosophy. But I hear you loud and clear always. You were a great speaker, a fantastic and witty intoner. But you are a gifted writer, a talent that rarely transfers. That John Wayne piece was astounding. I hear your voice through your words. In my voice. In my head.

I truly hope this works and something comes along that fills the need you have. But keep writing. I'm going to keep listening.

Just curious Roger: how fast do you type? Depending on how fast it is I can see a text to speech converter that uses your voice being very, very useful, but it would be directly related to how fast you type. I suppose you have a lot of typing experience with your background and you sure push out these blog entries effortlessly.

Ebert: Like many journalists, I type imperfectly but at blinding speed. Unfortunately, computer voices do not use fuzzy logic.

What I did want to know is if, well, after your second surgery, you discovered any small mercies in being forced to write everything? I know your verbal agility is important to you, but was there anything heartening you learned about yourself (or the rest of us) in this time? Keep writing, Roger. We hear you loud and clear.

Ebert: Yes, I did learn something, and I wrote about it:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/i_think_im_musing_my_mind.html

You'd make a wonderful interview subject for Diane Rehm, author of Finding My Voice, if you haven't already--sorry, I'm too time-strapped to look!--and this subject great for her show . . . ever talked, or "talked," with her?

I think you should get the ukelele background music like the Bush-O-Matic. Maybe they'll throw that in for free.

Hey Roger,

I've always assumed that the loss of your voice frustrated you enough to lead to the recent, prodigious output of writing on this site, film-related or otherwise. I, for one, am thankful for that.

Wishing you the best.

The most complicated music in the world is the human voice, talking.

Anyone who has ever sung knows the voice uses the entire head, throat and chest to produce a "unique" sound, which is one reason why it is so hard for a computer to generate a non-robotic sounding tone. I know about as much about computers as I do international trade commerce or genetic splicing, but perhaps you could seek out a singing voice program? The added emphasis on the difference between notes, combined with a voice program, might help overcome some of the flatness in tone.

(Not that I'm suggesting you sing all your thoughts--or am I?)

Roger, if you have your voice digitized and perhaps it becomes available to the masses (like W or Arny) are you prepared for the day when you meet another vocal-challenged individual and they speak to you in your own voice? That would be trippy.

When did Lawrence lose his peerage? I remember you and Chaz calling "him" Sir Lawrence at Ebertfest. Well, here's hoping your next voice is a king!

Hi. I read your review of "Ponyo." As a huge Miyazaki fan (I watched Studio Ghibli's "The Cat Returns" with my roommates only last week) I can't wait to see it!

However I think you are doing some of your readers a disservice when you critiqued people asking if the movie was dubbed: "'Is it only dubbed?' I was asked. You dummy! All animated films are dubbed! Little Nemo can’t really speak!"

As hilarious as the Nemo line was, I think it was only semi-accurate--all animated films must be dubbed, but all animated films are not always *only* dubbed. Some are also subtitled, like any other foreign film might be. I think that some of your readers may have been trying to ask, "is this movie only available as a dubbed movie, or are there theaters showing it with subtitles?" There are a lot of people (including myself, most of the time) who prefer to see animation with subtitles for various reasons (maybe they are learning another language, maybe they want to see a film in a state as close to the the original release as possible, etc.)

There is a huge debate between anime (Japanese animated film) fans regarding the merits of dubbing vs. subtitling. (I imagine that there is a similar debate between lovers of all non-English-language films, actually).

That question--"is Ponyo playing with subtitles anywhere in the US?"--is one would love to see answered here. (If it is, I would be happy to support Ghibli by going to see it twice!)

Ebert: There will no doubt be a choice on the DVD, but audiences won't find subtitles in theaters.

We can rebuild him, we might have the technology!

Roger,

I just want to add myself to the mass of people who wish you the very best of luck. With or without the voice generated by your vocal chords, your voice on print is undeniably unique and as strong and influential as your audio voice always was.

Hi Roger,

I wrote to you several years ago about my own bout with oral cancer and subsequent surgery, chemo, and radiation. I was fortunate to be able to the ability to speak but not with perfect clarity (I sound very raspy). Most people find my speech mostly intelligible (perhaps 70% at best), but, of course nothing like I was before.

Anyway, there are certain phonemes that I simply cannot say. For example, "G" and "K" sounds are problematic ("geek" becomes "ee"). When I need assisted speech, I use the AT&T voices that come with NaturalReader (http://www.naturalreaders.com/products.htm). The male voice is quite good and very intelligible, and I've used it to great effect when I have to speak with someone who is new to my voice over the phone. There is a free one, but it doesn't include the AT&T voices. The $50 version has 2 of the "good" voices. The $100 version has 4 of the AT&T voices. The nice thing about this software is that it will also attach itself to MS Word, Outlook, IE, and Firefox so that you can speak directly from within those applications as well. Also, you can convert a large text file into an mp3. The $100 version will do batch text-to-mp3 conversion if you need that.

I am a software engineer in the videogame industry and have done some audio programming in the past. I have often thought that it would be a fun project to sample someone's voice and recreate it digitally. At first blush, the problem seemed pretty simple. Almost like the cut-and-paste effect that you get on the Stern show when they do audio mashups. But, as you try to approach the audio equivalent of the "uncanny valley", things get much more difficult. Still it is an interesting problem.

Is there a convenient archive of your voice that is suitable for experimentation? At some point, you will have to gather all of the voice materials into one nice archive to hand-off to someone to try this out. I wouldn't mind taking a crack at it in my spare time.

Best of luck,

Ron

Ebert: Alas, Natural Reader is for Windows. Having to use Windows would itself be a handicap. :)

Good luck, Roger! As someone who habitually visits the old "Siskel & Ebert" television reviews online, I take for granted that I have access to your voice whenever I want to hear it. I use a very simplistic -- and free -- form of that kind of software to proofread (or help me read something when my eyes are tired) and it seems like a no-brainer to use such technology to help people recreate their voices.

Oh the things so many take for granted. I know that one day with laryngitis throws me off the tracks (though I tend to appreciate Yeats's wonderful "Speech after Long Silence" even more in such cases). As someone who is often too chatty, I cannot imagine being unable to speak. Inspirational stuff, as always, Roger.

I recently read an interesting take on the same topic.

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/302/3/236

I’m curious, reading this particular blog post, as well as others mentioning your vocal impairment, was the option of learning sign language one you were offered or had considered at any stage? Certainly among your own family circle at least, the cultivation of sign language might go some way to enabling a quicker flow of conversation for you to be involved in, and get rid of any frustrating time lapses.

Ebert: Chaz and I have a video of basic sign language, but alas it's no help in the world at large.

Fingers crossed and prayers to Lourdes that this software will meet your needs. But as I read this journal entry I became aware that I hadn't been missing your voice because I hear it when I read your reviews, journal, essays et al. For that I am blessed. Thank you.

Years ago I noticed that I'd spent so much time listening to Stephen Hawking speak in that off-the-shelf robot voice that I'd come to associate it with profound scientific intelligence. If I heard anything speak with that voice I paid attention as if it were the Professor himself asking me to pass the salt.

"I-TEM DID NOT SCANNN"

"Oh I beg your pardon, I'll just... hey!"

The voice didn't make Stephen Hawking sound like an idiot, he made it sound like a genius. Sort of like the way baldness made William Shatner look bad, but Patrick Stewart made baldness look good.

My advice: if you can't find a voice that sounds like your old one, get one that sounds distinctive, dramatic and weird, like James Earl Jones simulated on a pipe organ. We'll get to know it.

I know this is off-topic, but I love Paul Lynde. His Halloween Special is so tacky, hokey and corny, but hilarious. I can only imagine how absurd it must have been for your words to come out in a facsimile of his voice.

On a serious note, Roger, though I think people lean too much on technology, it can be a beautiful thing when put to use in cases such as yours. My mother's liver transplant bought her another 8 years of life before she succumbed to cancer 2 months ago. I appreciated every one of those days that the wonders of modern medicine kept her with us. She lived life to the fullest, even toward the end, and she would never have had that chance had it not been for technology.

I think it's beautiful that you've been able to find a voice, even if it's been an imperfect trip so far. Every time I read your reviews and blogs, I hear your voice as if you're reading it to me on my television. I've never had the pleasure to meet you in person, but I'm sure if I ever do, it would be wonderful to have a conversation with you, on paper or through the speakers of your computer. It's a brave fight you've put up against cancer, and I applaud you for continuing to give voice to your opinions through the blogs and reviews. I wish you the best in your endeavors to find a voice that suits you best. May technology restore to you what cancer has deprived you of, and God be with you.

It would be easier if you didn't speak English, where any word can be stressed to change the meaning of a sentence.

I really hope that program or some other works out for you. I can't even imagine how frustrating it must be for you. I think if it were me, I'd probably resort to either flipping people off or giving them the thumbs up. In your case, though, the latter might cause some to think you were referring to a movie.
Honestly though, I wonder how much more difficult it would be for you if you weren't so gifted with the written word. Obviously it's not the same as direct communication with someone, but you've connected with so many people through your books, reviews, and journal entries and you haven't had to make a sound to do it. I realize though, that that probably doesn't make much of a difference when you want someone to pass the salt.
Just know that your readers will continue to care about what you have to say whether we hear the words or not.

Like all of your fans, I too miss the sound of your voice, and wish you the best of luck in regaining it. One wonders, though, if the temptation to misuse Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice would be resistable. Imagine being able to pan "Kindergarten Cop" or "End of Days" with the voice of the Governator himself.

Greetings Roger,

This note is meant to merely convey empathy and best wishes whilst you're in the midst of your quest.

Here's hoping you're as one with the folks in Scotland before too long.

Chris Alders
Your friend in New Scotland (Nova Scotia, Canada)

Last four films viewed: (1) Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit; (2) Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; (3) March of the Penguins; (4) The Sea Inside

They should offset the cost of creating a custom voice for you by offering The Roger Ebert Voice for sale to anyone else who would like to use it the way you used Lawrence and Alex. You have a strong, intelligent voice, and I bet you're not the only one who would like to use it.

This Scottish company should make a deal with you. You give them the right to sell your voice to others, and they give you a steep discount, in a sense giving you some of the proceeds from the sale of your voice in advance.

They are giving you your voice back, but you are also giving your voice to them (and to us).

What are the odds that they'll "accidentally" slip you Siskel's voice?

Here's one more option for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS).

AT&T Labs has been at the forefront of developing this kind of technology. At the link below, you can try out a demo using a variety of voices. Type in some text and listen as it's read in the voice you choose.

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Each TTS voice is based on an actual person's voice. Some businesses have had synthesized voices created for them using the voices of professional voice talents, so that they can maintain brand identity and consistency with recorded messages.

Anybody's voice could in theory be synthesized, provided there are ample recorded samples of the person speaking. I think for Roger, with all the broadcasts he's done over the years, that would be doable.

Roger,

My sincerest best wishes to you in finding a way to regain your "sonic voice," through electronic means or otherwise. I say your "sonic voice," because your "mental voice" has never been silenced. As proved by your repeated entries on this award-winning blog, your mind has a voice that will never be silenced. It WILL be heard (or read), one way or another.

But I understand your desire to have your natural voice restored. Hopefully, the folks at CereProc can provide you with a new means to have your "sonic voice" heard once again.

By the way, speaking of voices, in your review of "Ponyo," and in other reviews I've read, you refer to the voices of animated characters as being "dubbed."

From today's review:

Already I have heard from a few people who don’t want to see it “because it’s Japanese.” This is solid-gold ignorance. “Is it only dubbed?” I was asked. You dummy! All animated films are dubbed! Little Nemo can’t really speak!

Actually, Roger, the voices in most American animated films are not "dubbed." "Dubbing" implies that the animation is completed first, and then the voices are dubbed in afterwards to match the animated characters' lip movements.

In fact, for most animated films, the voices are recorded before any animation is done. The animators then use the voice recordings -- and videotapes of the actors recording the voices in the studio -- to develop the looks and movements of the animated characters.

This is why many animated characters bear a strong resemblance to their vocal performers. Notice how Cowboy Woody in "Toy Story" resembles Tom Hanks, and how The Genie in "Aladdin" resembles Robin Williams in facial expression and body movement. Williams's vocal improvisations in the recording studio also inspired the Genie's shape-shifting powers, where, in the movie, the animated Genie can turn himself into caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenneger and other stars just as easily as Williams himself switches into different voices in his improv act.

The animators also use the recordings of the voice actors to synchronize the lip movements of the animated characters with their pre-recorded speaking lines.

This technique of recording voices before the animation is done has been used since the beginning days of animation. In the early 1930's, as sound cartoons were being developed, the animators at Disney and Warner Bros. found it was easier to synchronize sound with animation if you pre-recorded a character's voice before work on the animation was begun.

Today, even in computer animated films like "Finding Nemo," the voices are pre-recorded. Pre-recording of voices is also used for animated CGI characters (i.e. Alvin and the Chipmunks) in live action moives.

Dubbing of voices is only used for animated films from foreign countries, like Miyazaki's films and other anime movies, where the original film is in a foreign language. English-language voices are recorded and then dubbed over the original Japanese-language voices.

So "Ponyo" definitely qualifies as a "dubbed animated film." But most original American animated films are created using pre-recorded voices for the characters. Of course, only someone familiar with the animation process, as I am, would know this.

P.S. You say you have encountered people who don't want to see "Ponyo" because "it's Japanese!" Who are these people?! Are they the same idiots who say Obama can't be president because he was born in Kenya and his Hawaiian birth certificate was obviously forged? Sheesh!

Ebert: Well of course you're right, but in the brief space of a review I meant it in the generally understood meaning.

Roger,

I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit.

I wanted to let you know that your blog featured prominently in my recently defended (sucessfully, thank God :) master's thesis on blogging as it relates to composition instruction. Its fancy title is "Weblog Writing and Post-Process Ecocomposition Theory in Secondary English Instruction." Probably went a little too far on the academic-speak there.

As others have pointed out, your voice in this blog is a joy to read, and trust me, I've read each entry and many of the comments carefully. It's a testement to your voice that despite being burnt out by blogs after my thesis, I still come back read yours often.

Thanks for that voice - now that I've graduated, I look forward to reading it entirely for pleasure and insight.

Ebert: Your academese seems clear to me. "Post-Process Ecocomposition" obviously refers to writing by employees of the Ebert Company after surgery.

I hope this all works out for you. I saw you speak at the Savannah College of Art and Design several years ago. Perhaps one day computer technology will allow you to resume your scene by scene dissections of Citizen Kane.

Reading this journal post got me thinking about all the long term possibilities.

What do you think about this idea: computer software that could analyze your reviews and opinions - looking for patterns. Then the details of a new film (plot, genre, director, etc.) could be analyzed to determine your probable reaction to the film. That information combined with realistic computer animations and voice simulation could allow you to be on TV reviewing new films forever.

Roger: This comment is not related to the blog since I haven't had time to read it yet. However, I wanted to point out a line in your "Thirst" review that I believe will be quoted 100 years from now: "Movies exist to cloak our desires in disguises we can accept." Wow.

Ebert: I've been thinking a lot about vampire movies, and wondering why anyone would ever want to be, or even know, a vampire, or even like to think they exist.

There was a very interesting article in Wired recently about Dilbert's creator Scott Adams and his struggles with spasmodic dysphonia. It's obviously a different issue than you face, but it shows something of the length to which people will go to regain their voice when lost. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-08/ff_adams?currentPage=all

Good luck, Mr. Ebert.

Speech processing is very complicated. During my master's I worked with speech (from an engineering point-of-view). For my PhD, I decided to explore a different field: video. It was a smart move... way less complicated.

However, there are many smart people that love working with speech and spend their lives looking at long, complicated math models. Me, I prefer to look at pixels.

I wish you the best of luck in one day finding a voice of your own, Roger.

...However, I admit I have a more selfish and sinister reason to comment here: To provide a few humble suggestions of things to make George W. Bush say. For instance,

1) Batty's famous last words in "Blade Runner":

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.

2) Lyrics from a Dr. Dre song (note some language is NSFW)

3) Lyrics from a Jonathan Coulton song (note: ditto)

4) And there's just something eerily appropriate about hearing Bush recite this poem (yet more NSFW language follows):

Nothing but the hurt left here.
Nothing but bullets and pain
and the bled out slumping
and all the fucks and goddamns
and Jesus Christs of the wounded.
Nothing left here but the hurt.

Believe it when you see it.
Believe it when a 12-year-old
rolls a grenade into the room.
Or when a sniper punches a hole
deep into someone’s skull.
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.

Roger,

You know the old expression, “He has a face for radio.” Well, I’ve always described myself, ruefully, as someone who has a voice for books. Your journal entry reminded me (a blond with a voice several octaves above the "credibility" threshold for grown women) to be thankful for the voice I have. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for continuing to share your singular voice, in print, with all of us.

Have you tried and rejected an artificial larynx type device?
http://www.harriscomm.com/index.php/equipment/speech-assistance/artificial-larynx.html?mode=list

Ebert: Won't work for me. I just plain ain't gonna never speak no more.

Hi Rodger- I'm a researcher in town with a keen interest in HCI. Hopefully keyboards like this:

http://gizmodo.com/5331577/microsofts-pressure+sensitive-keyboard-could-change-the-way-you-type

will become as commonplace as scroll wheel mice. They could open the door to software that lets you add inflection through the way you type. It's the sort of thing that could go from oddity to necessity in the span of a few months. -Drew

Do people speak to you as they used to, or do they ask you questions in a slightly (though unintentionally) patronizing tone, as though you were a child?

I often find that interactions with those who are - but for the ability to speak - of perfectly sound mind, to be like that.

As an aside, I miss the way you used to pronounce the word "because." It was the only hint that you had a regional accent of some kind.

Ebert: No, it's everybody else who has a regional accent. Yes, people sometimes over-explain things to me.

Good luck, Mr. Ebert!

I have one suggestion. Rather than getting your own voice, have them come up with a voice file for Joan Greenwood, the English actress who had, IMHO, the sexiest voice ever.

Dear Roger,

I just wanted to say that your blog is something that I always read with a smile on my face. It is probably the only web page I come to see a few times a day just to see if there is a new post or a new review I haven't read. For a person without a voice, thousands of miles away (Croatia, on the Adriatic Sea), you do have a pretty strong influence on my daily rituals and that means something. At least to me it does. So, don't think you don't have a voice, because you do. Not in a physical sense, but it does exist. And it is more clear and louder than most of the real voices I come across on a daily basis.
On another note: If I had a company that could provide you with a voice, or if I were a computer wizard at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, I would embark on the endeavor of creating such a program that suits you pro bono. There is something in the pride having restored a voice for a Pulitzer Prize winner that actually DOES want to try different things, and is not afraid to test the possibilities of the technology. People usually think that this eagerness comes with the obvious fact that everyone wants to get better, or at least as well as they were before. But they fail to realize that the most loose hope after a few months of failure, or if their recovery isn't progressing as they have imagined. They should not loose their hope. I hate to cite Star Wars because it always looks geeky, but I will do it this time by saying "Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter". People tend to forget that. You, I think, have not forgotten it.

This is why I appeal to every company, every individual, every whizz kid and every prodigy out there to help you on your journey of regaining your "speaking" voice.

Ebert: One of the great joys of blogging is making friends from all over the world.

Hi Roger,

Are you able to use an electrolarynx? I agree that the voice quality is often awful, but they are handy faster at keeping up with the flow of daily conversation than typing out what you want to say.

Having said that, I do hope that computer technology advances so that you can sound like yourself again. Best of luck.

Ebert: Unable.

The most depressing thing about all of this is that it is Roger Ebert that has no voice, when there are so many who don't deserve to have a voice that continue to speak.

The Glen Becks and the Rush Limbaughs of the world should count their blessings.

That George Bush device is ingenious, and if they can get him to say "Who are these guests of yours" and "What are you having for dinner" as well as he does, I'm sure they can get you talking! I am so excited for you, and for us! You might even have another dvd commentary to offer.

Your article reminded me of 12th grade. I was not a fan of my high school, or of high school dances, and couldn't wait for the prom to be over and done with so that I didn't have to hear about it anymore, or explain why I wasn't going. The Monday after, with a light heart, working on a film review for my "Newspaper" class, my teacher made an announcement. "My wife teaches deaf students at (a different) high school. One of them was just dumped by her boyfriend, and we need to find someone to replace him, so that she can go to the prom. Is there anyone here who would be kind enough to go with her?" I lowered myself in my seat and stared at my film review with heart palpitations. One of the other students quietly said "Peter"...then another, "Yes, Peter." And then the teacher, "Peter, how about it?" I shook my head, "No, no, no. I don't do proms."
The next day, my teacher took me to a tuxedo shop for a fitting, and gave me money to buy Nancy a corsage.
On prom night, before the dance, we sat at a table with 12 other deaf students, and no one who could speak but me. I was looking from one side of the table to the other, trying to figure out what the heck the topic of conversation was. I wondered how the students were able to enjoy the songs, and seemed to understand the melodies in the music. Their favorite, because of the physical gestures involved, was "YMCA."
In-between the dances, Nancy and I returned to our white paper clothed table. We took turns writing to each other, getting to know each other through our written words.
After the prom, we kept in contact over the phone, with a "relay" service in which she would type to the operator and the operator would speak her words to me. It was fine, except for when Nancy asked me private questions. I imagined the operator translating back to her "Uh, um...cough, cough..."
I have a box in the garage. Inside that box is one half of a tablecloth, completely scribbled over with conversation. It's been 15 years since I've read what's on it.

Hi Roger,

I want to echo earlier posters in saying that while you may lack the ability to speak, your voice remains as strong as ever. It's not what your reviews and blog posts are about, it's how they are about them.

But now the real purpose of this comment:

Where on earth did you find the image of the Shout-O-Phone? I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Who knew Dr. Seuss was an audiologist? The thing is, I can't figure out if it's for real. You have to admit, it looks like the sort of thing you might see advertised in The Onion. Still there's a part of me that really hopes these once actually existed.

You know, if they can do that George W. Bush thing as well as they do... and I'm guessing they didn't convince El Presidente to sit down and record his voice, so they used old recordings of his, too... I don't see why they couldn't do yours. It's a lot closer to 100% than I thought it would be. Can't wait to hear you do a review again.

Hey Rog,

When you first saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in the spring of 1968, was your experience during the film suddenly heightened, even if only briefly, when you learned where HAL was created? I'm originally from Omaha, NE, and when I'm deeply absorbed in a movie and Omaha is mentioned ("Michael Clayton"), I sort of experience an even deeper, more personal connection with the movie, if only for a moment. Had I been at the press screening of "2001" in '68, and I was from Urbana, I may have well lost it in there.

Cheers!

Ebert: I was much pleased.

Roger, my interest in your words and voice are implicit in my reading your blog and your columns and responding the rare times I feel I have something to add. So, to the point: What can we, your readership do to help? I ask that sincerely. Can these companies make use of free labor such as data entry? Can they make use of linked pc's? Can they provide testing programs for people to use to aid in their research? I will do this or anything else I can commit to (and actually accomplish). I am guessing, should everyone forgive my presumption, that many others would help as well. Roger, I would be investing in my own entertainment, enlightenment, and enjoyment. Yes, there is also the fact that I care about you as a human being because of who you seem to be, what you seem to believe, and simply because you are a fellow person.
So. I challenge you, sir, to challenge us and to challenge whatever company or companies you choose. People can accomplish great things working together. I humbly say, let's get this done. You have my email and are welcome to use it. You are invited to take this as a commitment and you are encouraged to let something grow from this tiny seed of an idea. We can get this done.
Kevin Coombs

Good luck, Mr Ebert sir. You were my favorite guest on the Howard Stern Show. Always a great interview, and you "got" the show. YOu and Howard had such a good rapport.

I remember him once goofing on you because you listened to "Chutney Soka" type music. You asked him if he knew what it was. Without a beat, he says "Sure i do - it was my air name in Detroit", to which you replied - "Good one".

Technology will only improve, and i look forward to hearing you on his show once again.

Roger, I'm happy that you haven't allowed your inability to speak to cripple your desire to communicate. I cannot imagine what having thoughts you can't express must be like. Would you consider using "Fred" or one of his relatives for a DVD commentary?

I'm not expecting perfection.

In the still developing world of software engineering, it is best to set your sights a lot lower than that.
A lot lower, sometimes.
For humorous examples see thedailywtf.com. A lot of it may fly over your head, as there is an assumption of familiarity with programming. (Is there obscure film critic humor? It's like that.)

All the best, I do hope you find your voice in the speaking world.

It is a shame that you, someone with so much to say, is without a voice and there are so many people shouting saying nothing. I hold out hope that you are able to find a suitable voice.

I have been through several adversities in my life, but I have never faced anything as serious as a life threatening illness, or the loss of my voice. I find it very inspirational that you continue to work, even while facing such dire circumstances. If I ever found myself in the same situation, I would probably be dismayed. You, on the other hand, seem to have outdone yourself recently in writing both your reviews and these journal entries. This shows not only remarkable dedication, but extreme personal strength.

I wish you the best of luck in the quest to regain a spoken voice.

Ebert: Why would one rather hear a podcast of a computer voice than read the review?

Again, the right computer voice capable of "your" inflection, emphasis, tone, etc....would be the goal. This is the idea of a different experince, not a better nor worse one.

This is some great news coming from you, Roger. As well, the fact that you are out and about at a continual pace is, I think, enlightening and a rather comforting thought. Hopefully, we can all get to hear the voice you choose for your computer and/or self.

Maybe not related to the topic at hand, yet I wanted to ask you a question. In your Journal entry "The Greatest Movies Ever Made", in reference to the Spectator's listing of what it considers "The 20 Greatest Movies Ever Made", you mentioned that 19 of those 20 are in your Great Movies collection. As of this writing, 18 are listed in your Great Movies column, with I am assuming "Black Narcissus" being the 19th. Is "Black Narcissus", therefore, the newest Great Movie, or will it be a surprise for us all? In any case, thank you again for your efforts in reading this post, along with all the other posts in this community of film and life enthusiasts.

Kindest Regards and Best Wishes,

Robert Kelly

My daughter was watching Cars today, and it struck me:

Some movies use only practical effects to present the story. Some are enhanced by CGI. Some are entirely CGI. The important thing is that the medium serves the story; ultimately, the most important thing is always whether or not they tell a good story.

Roger, you always tell a good story.

Ebert: I've been thinking a lot about vampire movies, and wondering why anyone would ever want to be, or even know, a vampire, or even like to think they exist.

Eternal life, youth and beauty; ability to resist the erosion of time; the ultimate conquest of our mortality - a parallel of certain ideals that are valued in our society, no? If you say movies are cloaks of our desires, then I happen to think they do so by way of projection and amplification of such desires into fantasies. Vampire movies do just that.

Oh, and it is the easiest transcendence for an outsider - one simple act, which you don't even have to initiate, and you can go from nerdy weirdo mortal to ethereally youthful beauty who can easily overpower any of your previous bullies. Such concept is appealing, I think, given the existence of so many injustices and inequalities in our society that are, sometimes, inescapable within the bounds of lukewarm reality.

Nothing against Howard Stern, but why all the references to an old conversation with Mr. Stern? Has Sirius re-run the interview recently?

Also, I can't believe you haven't been profiled by "60 Minutes" yet. Yours is a perfect story for them.

Honestly I've been reading your work for so long that your words kind of are your speaking voice. It's kind of weird, like when your reading a book it's truly only on the page and in your head, but you can see it and feel it and hear it.

I don't know, what I guess I'm trying to say is that whatever happens you probably already know that you have a voice that is heard and understood.

I truly do wish you luck in your search, though.

I'm glad to see you're a Mac user. That's an advantage right there, in my opinion. But rather than add to the already excellent suggestions here, I have a question: Do you find that, in not being able to use your voice, it has any impact one way or another on your writing?

I would imagine that it would make it even stronger, since the desire to express yourself clearly and powerfully is that much intensified... and also that you would end up doing a lot more writing in your head, throughout the day.

I ask because I'm a writer by trade and also because my mother, a weekly columnist for 11 years and a lifetime essayist, lost her voice last year for a few months in a row. She found it EXTREMELY frustrating and not a little frightening.

"Nothing against Howard Stern, but why all the references to an old conversation with Mr. Stern? Has Sirius re-run the interview recently?"

No there have been no re-runs that I am aware of. It's just that Ebert along with Siskel and later Roeper were/are great friends of the show and their appearances were always great. That Ebert cannot come on the show anymore due to his illness is a great tragedy for Stern fans.

That's all.

I wish you the best of luck. Reading this post reminded me of when I first moved to Brazil. In its required proportions to your circumstance, I lost my voice. Not because of any illness but because I couldn't speak Portuguese. My then wife, a Brazilian, had to try to translate everything to me and translate back my responses. I felt so helpless that first year at company parties and family get together's. I know exactly what you are talking about timing and pointlessness in a conversation. Like I said, my situation doesn't compare to yours, I eventually learned to speak Portuguese and learned how to express my own opinions. However I do hope that I could listen to one of your movie discussions again. Even more, I hope others that have never heard you before have the chance, I'm sure many of them will find your analysis and commentaries as thought provoking as those of us fans of your have. You have been such a big influence in my life. Probably more now than ever. And I feel like I'm starting to spread the good critical "gospel" of movies. Because I talk so much about your reviews and blog, my younger sister and one of my younger cousins have started visiting your site and now we talk about these films that, before, only I watched.
They haven't reached the point of exclaiming "that's one of the greatest movies I ever seen" yet, but at least they know they exist, even better, some are being watched.

All the best to you and your family.

Maybe a high school student can figure out how to give you your voice. A few years ago a student built a generic segway as a science fair project. It had three wheels instead of two but it balanced and turned and was way less expensive than a real segway. I hope someone figures it out for you soon.

Ebert: I've been thinking a lot about vampire movies, and wondering why anyone would ever want to be, or even know, a vampire, or even like to think they exist.

I think the concept of the vampire - or at least as it's presented in the recent batch of post-Anne Rice "being undead is pretty neat and here's why" novels and movies - has a deeper resonance for those who fear death and the unknown than for those who accept it as J.M. Barrie's "awfully big adventure." Think of the "Twilight" kiddies and their dreams of eternal bliss with their very first high-school boyfriends. Wanting to be a vampire isn't just about running towards evil; it's about holding on to something else as well. Most vampire narratives have an undercurrent of loss prevention going on, hence generations of Draculas who have wealth and power and then go ahead and get themselves staked while trying to make immortal brides for themselves. If you could avoid seeing the love of your life, your parents, your sick child waste away and die, all in exchange for nipping a stranger on the neck every now and then, would you?

I, on the other hand, have fallen into the "awfully big adventure" category since childhood, and perhaps that is why there are few things on this planet that please me more than immense swarms of rotting zombies.

Count me in as one of those who hears your voice when reading your blog entries. Your voice may have left you, at least for now, but it has thousands of other receptacles here.

Roger,

Throughout my adolescence your writings were a formative influence on my burgeoning love of film and film criticism. You are one of the two living critics (the other being rock-crit Robert Christgau) whose reviews I can read and reread simply for their eloquence and wit. Your reviews of such recent masterworks as The Squid and the Whale, Rachel Getting Married, and Synecdoche, New York I enjoyed practically as much as the films themselves, and your excoriations of such dreck as Transformers 2 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine say more about the current climate of the entertainment industry than an entire issue of...Ah, but now I am sinking into the emtpy prattling of a fanboy. So I will end here with a heartfelt Thank You.

I wish you so much more than luck.

Oh, Roger, we miss your voice!

What have the doctors said about when you might speak again? Is it going to happen? Do you know that it will never occur? When was the last time you spoke? What did you say?

We miss your voice, but I am so glad to have your blog, along with your constant film reviews and commentaries to try to fill the void.

Brian

Roger (if I may call you so), have you ever considered doing a comentary on DVD, only instead of audio comentary, a subtitled one? I believe this would have some advantages, such as being able to correct yourself, ponder, add and edit as you please. And they would certainly feel like a filme class. People have been doing this with various videos in youtube, and I think the results are very good. Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lOwi6upg4I

Also, I had been reading your reviews for a long time before hearing your voice for the first time, and it was way different. No other thought here, just mentioning.

When I was around 12 years old, my father began to lose his voice to spasmodic dysphonia. At the time he had been a teacher of history and vocal music for over 20 years. He essentially became disabled but he continued to teach for a little while longer. I was in his class the final year he taught history and he actually had me do a lecture or two for the class on certain subjects. It felt but a little weird to say the least but I still do speak for him sometimes when he orders food at a restraunt or if needs to make a phone call to somebody who doesn't know him. If they don't know him they sometimes laugh, or hang up thinking that he's mocking them. Right now he just says that he has lost his voice like it was temporary and that seems to get people to pay attention more.

Now to go into a not completely different direction...

I'm a software engineer and I can say that natural voice has been difficult to develop and will be for sometime. It has to do with the many contexts and ambiguities that exist due to natural language and for that matter speech. Just for a quick experiment, try your speech programs with this:

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

If you used Alex on this one then you can see, or rather hear, where Alex and possibly other speech programs fail. It's the context/tense for the word "read" that messes things up. I would like to know if any of your programs don't have this problem or with other homographs. I imagine that one could create a program that could look ahead like we do but it may be a problem if one uses long run on sentences and even this would not solve the problem with simple sentences like:

"I read newspapers."

By itself, nobody can say if that's past or present tense except the writer.

I do have to say that I only done minor phonemic programs. I have not done any work on the software that you have tried or anything of that magnitude.

Dear Roger,
Might I suggest the voice of the lovable robot Hal 9000? I'd love you hear you disagree with Roeper again in that voice. "I'm sorry Richard, but I can't allow you to recommend this film." "This film is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it at the box office."

Don't they also make artificial larynxes nowadays?

Mr. Ebert,

I have known one or two people without a speaking voice in my life. The only people I've seen them interact with, though, were people who had some kind of handicap of their own. I suspect those circumstances made communication easier, because having a disability almost inevitably makes one more sensitive to the effects of someone else's disability. In the instances I've witnessed, that meant that everyone at least waited for the sentence to be fully formed and expressed before going on. In that sense, even the person without a voice of his own was fully involved in the conversation at hand.

Of course, I realize that even in a group full of people who have this basic awareness, a synthesized voice still doesn't allow for much nuance in your speech patterns. But as far as the timing goes, what it comes down to is that a lot of people just never think about what it really means not to be able to articulate a thought instantly, as it takes shape in your mind.

And because of that, I applaud you for throwing a post like this on the world wide web, where thousands of people - if not more - are going to read it. I hope it may help you personally in as many ways as possible - ideally by way of some graduate student's offer to help you synthesize a voice of your own. But I know that it will probably help others too, insofar as it makes more people aware of the issues involved.

In that sense: thank you for sharing.

Hello Mr. Ebert,

Thanks for a wonderful article that carries all your usual trademark humor and eloquence even when describing the most difficult of times.

I do know what you're going through, in some ways -- my wonderful stepfather had laryngeal cancer (a particularly virulent form he battled for several years), and ultimately permanently lost his voice. There was definitely a learning curve for him and for all of us as he recovered, helped by his natural abilities as a mimic and comedian (he had amazing and wonderful expressions, he was positively Chaplinesque!) as well as by the dry-erase boards we kept all over the house (he also kept a small one around his neck for hasty observations).

I would also recommend a few other ideas that assisted us, in case they help. With my dad, we got him dry-erase boards that were also magnetic. I bought printable business cards for home printers, plus several stacks of those business-card-sized magnets (at any office supply store) made for affixing to business cards. I then printed up all my dad's funny unique catchphrases as well as typical conversational tidbits, words and phrases, and he kept these affixed to a board near him. Then, if he just wanted to enter the conversation without opening his computer or writing longhand, he could simply instead hold up the cards or put them on his board for quick asides or comments, and he loved that.

I also got him to use a PC program called NextUp Talker -- I'd promoted the company for years so knew exactly how the software would help him. Like the wonderful program and technology you describe here, the program is Text to Speech, and my dad loved the fact that he could speak aloud by computer so easily. (Just in case it might be of interest, you can find out more about Talker's assistance to those with voice loss at http://www.talkforme.com -- but no pressure.) He also carried a whistle around his neck so that he could alert us at any time if needed, or call us to him.

All of these steps -- the dry-erase boards, the magnets and catchphrases, and software, helped to empower my Dad, to remind him that although he was silent, he was not voiceless.

Just in case it helps... Meanwhile, thanks for sharing your experiences with us with so much warmth and humor, and don't give up hope! (The amazing thing about the written word is, no matter what, it means you will always, always have a voice -- and you will always be heard, just as we hear you now.)

Cheers and warm regards to you, and your family --

Angela D. Mitchell

Could a voice be created by sampling the years of your talking on Siskel & Ebert and other media appearences?

This is unrelated to the fine article, but I notice you haven't put up a review of In The Loop yet. I saw it the other day at my local independent theater and thought it was the funniest film of the year so far, certainly one of the funniest of the past several years. Interested to read/hear what you think about it if you've seen it already, and if not, well, I'd say seek it out but you don't really miss anything.

I just went to CereProc. I typed your last two phrases, and synthesized voice was quite nice. Adding emotional intonation will make it more natural, I think. Like many visitors, I wish you good luck.

By the way, your writing reminds me of research on organ regeneration through stem cells. I do not have enough information about this, but, I think it will able to be other way of regaining voice in far future. Liver, pancreas, heart... why not other parts? Anyway, Stem cells are still elusive, and I think softwares and machines will advance more quickly for giving you and other people new voices.

P.S.

I watched "Ponyo" last year. I thought it was good but not that great, like "Howl's Moving Castle". However, it is growing on me and I love the soundtrack. I was very amused with some part in Wagnerian style(Ponyo's other name is Brunhilde).

Just to echo a statement made earlier, reading your words, I can fully hear your voice. Not just because it's one I've heard so much, but because you write the way you speak, eloquently but imbued with a character that's unmistakably your own.

I'm not sure if this is relevant but I wanted to say it anyway. I happened to be at the 500 Days of Summer preview screening you attended a month or so ago, and walked past you as you were entering the theater. I did not see a sick man. That made me very happy. For all the bad luck you've run into medically, nothing seems to have been lost about you as a person. I've been to several screenings and events you've hosted before your surgery, and the man I saw walk into the screening was the same one I saw the Chicago Film Festival and on TV every week. You may have lost your voice, but god damnit if your writing isn't as good as it's ever been. Truly, the best of luck in trying to vocalize delightful and wonderful mind.

Roger: It was quite clear from watching you debate with Gene Siskel on your television show over many years that you loved verbal repartee and that you were indeed both quick and perceptive. I believe you when you say you miss that give and take. Maybe you can confect a reasonable facsimile using the wonders of the internet.

In addition to your brief reviews of new movie offerings on this blog, why don't you conduct an ongoing dialectic about selected films, not with all comers (which would clearly be information overload for all concerned, which is why you don't respond to all comments here), but with some of your professional peers. For example, the new movie District 9 has been received with mixed applause in the other reviews I have read. The fellow from the Washington Post loved it, the one from Slate bemoaned the fact that a powerful megacorporation was again being made the villain in a scifi movie. I would say to him, who else besides the government or a megacorporation would ever be in a position to play the heavy with such a role? In the United States, where privatisation is part of the conservative state religion, the government now hires corporations to carry out every manner of dirty work. I don't know where that reviewer spends his time hiding from the world. A big corporation (like, say, Blackwater or Haliburton) would be the natural bad guys in a real world scenario.

I'd like to see you argue it back and forth with guys like that. You know, like so many folks do on political blogs. I'd make the ground rules such that you each got to give a 1000-word opening critique, followed by a specific number (five seems reasonable) of point-counterpoint exchanges. There doesn't have to be a winner or loser. There are enough professional movie reviewers out there, you could engage a different peer each week. I guess I am suggesting "At the Movies," but on-line rather than on TV.

Just a thought (which I'll bet you've already had).

It strikes me that your quest is a nice metaphor for individuals and groups seeking a voice. It is one thing to finally get a voice, it's another to be heard. And being heard is not the same as being understood.

In terms of what you are actually speaking about, it's amazing what we can do with technology but, as develop these tools, the more we see how much more complex what we're trying to achieve is. I think most of us just think in terms of recreating words aurally. But once we do, we see how involved it is, how important tone and nuance and singularity are -- an individual voice is made up of so many things. It's like what is said about writing: how something is said is as important as what is said.

I wish you all the best!

Roger,

Beautiful column. My heart goes out to you. Unfortunately, I can't assist you, but it does my soul good to see how many others can and are offering to help.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, may I recommend this story I wrote a couple of years ago:

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1202932

I hope you enjoy it. It's not very long, and it's all dialogue.

"The most depressing thing about all of this is that it is Roger Ebert that has no voice, when there are so many who don't deserve to have a voice that continue to speak."

Of course you have a voice, Roger. I follow this blog much more closely than I ever followed your TV show.

I knew HAL would be referenced in some way the minute I started reading this. Is there a way to program and then switch voices, perhaps of famous people? Think of the possibilities:
Chaz could have a dinner conversation with FDR. Leonard Maltin could interview Mel Blanc again. Richard Roeper jokes with Groucho Marx. Studs Terkel tells us another story.
Just an idea.

One more thing: My name is spelled "Dave Van Dyke." Would you mind changing the note over the Youtube link I sent you with the Senators and Governors who don't believe in evolution?

"Van Dyck" is the painter I could have been if I didn't turn to the devil's music and had any painting talent whatsoever.

Roger,

Once again, thanks for being so honest about the personal matters of your life. I'm certain that you perhaps know all too well the realities of a Wittgenstein philosophy, "the limits of my language means the limits of my world". Yet, it is certainly true that pressed with these limits your thoughts on movies and in these journals are delightfully expansive and true. At least that's my reading. Do you ever identify with "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"? I know that the limitations in that movie were of a different sort, but equal in depth I would imagine. I do love that movie.

I would hope that your family and friends could get the hang of it. I fondly remember playing euchre with my wife's 90+ year-old Grandfather, and everyone just waited when he was trying to say something. His wit was well worth the wait--it just took him a little longer to get the words out. But it's true that in groups bigger than 4-6 he did have trouble participating in the conversation.

Hi Roger. I do hope that science finds a solution that will restore your voice.

Speaking of artificial voices, I have a question about your Ponyo review. You said in your review that some people expressed concern about it being dubbed into English. Well, I'm one of those who is weary of the English translation, and I'll tell you why.

I've seen and love all of Miyazaki's films, and the wonders of DVD have provided an opportunity to directly compare the English and Japanese dubs. Although I do not speak Japanese, the differences are obvious. The Japanese versions have a certain quiet serenity, while the English translations are always LOUD!!! The English voice actors are, for some reason, compelled to SHOUT ALL THEIR LINES!!! Whenever the films were supposed to have moments of reflection, the English language translation will invariably force some unnecessary music into the scene, or just carry over a CONVERSATION!!!

Perhaps this unnecessary loudness is reflective of American culture. Children, I guess, will not listen unless they are BEING SHOUTED AT ALL THE TIME. Sigh. Miyazaki's films are great because they are both whimsical -and- contemplative. American directors get the whimsy, but they don't get the subtly.

I should note that Ponyo isn't the first Miyazaki film to be translated by John Lasseter. He also directed the voices for Howl's Moving Castle and Porco Rosso, and probably others. Much as I like Pixar's films, Lassetter's work on Studio Ghibli's films are still guilty of the "the loudening".

Ebert: I know. The best is subtitled DVDs.

Thank you for writing this inspiring article. I miss you on television. I grew up watching you "At the Movies" arguing with Gene. If I could I would build this speking device for you. Good luck my friend, we love you.

...the one from Slate bemoaned the fact that a powerful megacorporation was again being made the villain in a scifi movie. I would say to him, who else besides the government or a megacorporation would ever be in a position to play the heavy with such a role?

The Slate critic probably bemoaned it because The Evil Corporation is the most hackneyed cliche in filmed SF (and in literary SF as well, although the Utopia of Parthenogenetic Women gives it a good run for its money). A movie which featured a government bureaucrat or corporate CEO as a decent human being with human cares and concerns would be a conceptual breakthrough.

Roger,
If I worked for Industrial Light and Magic, I’d love to meet you. Of course, I’d love to meet you if I didn’t. Anyway, what I’m thinking is that the ILM people might have the resources, and generosity, to help you get your voice back.
Just a personal observation, but for me you really haven’t lost your voice. I heard you on some show saying that you wanted to go to Steak ‘N’ Shake, and at the time, I heard the Englishman’s voice, and yet I remember what you said as being spoken in your own voice. It’s like when I was younger and my family had a black and white TV, when programs were being broadcast in color. I’d see the show, but later on I’d forget that I had seen it in B&W.
Post Script:
Recently, I heard the Navy Seals say that being mentally tough is more important than being physically tough to succeed in their training. I’ve thought that for years and have considered Stephen Hawking the toughest man in the world.
I’m astonished at how much you’ve done with your website. What you’ve done is amazing to me. It seems like you’re busier now than ever, and the quality is superb. You are my hero in so many ways.

Dear Roger,

Let me join the chorus of your fans here to say that I have long admired you. Like many here, I grew up watching you and Gene (I still miss him) and it pains me to see you unable to verbaly trash a film so deserving of it (I seem to recall a few from just this summer alone).

I saw your interview with Leonard Maltin and was very inspired by it. Though I was also thinking, gosh, if they could just program a voice to sound just like Roger's.

Here's to someone much smarter than me designing that very program. I know there has to be someone like that out there.

In the meantime, I continue to enjoy reading your reviews. Thankfully we can still hear you through those!

Best regards,
Mat

Ebert: I've been thinking a lot about vampire movies, and wondering why anyone would ever want to be, or even know, a vampire, or even like to think they exist.

Well I wish SOMEBODY would to a study. Lately the biggest selling book out there is the Stephanie Meyers' vampire series. Her sales alone have been keeping the Hatchette Book Group afloat, so I read. She's being sued by an old college roommate for "plagiarism," but the story line is so common, it's like suing somebody for also having come up with a 12-bar blues song.

Here's what I've got so far: Bram Stoker's DRACULA caught fire in the 19th C because it was an allegory for the parasitical behavior of the royalty of the day. European royalty had been "sucking the life blood" out of the commoners forever by then. It was a world of useless, rich fops forever being supported by the sweat of everybody else.

The use of the legendary Vlad Tepes as the model for Count Dracula was a very handy cover, since "Vlad the Impaler" really was a murderous, sadistic cad in his day -- but remote enough so as not to bring down the wrath of current royalty. The legends of vampires had been around for centuries, leftovers from the days of the demons that the pagan religions had around, like Incubi and Succubi, Ashteroth and the lot. Stoker's use of the vampire was clever enough not to offend the demonologies of the various Christian churches, as well.

The key theme, however, was of royalty sucking the life-blood of the good commoner to sustain himself, undead and unholy, forever. Europe and Eurasia were virtually infested with real-life royalty taxing the populace that way. Socialism and Communism had arisen in reaction to it.

It's analogous to the now-legendary 50's horror flicks that appeared to be allegories for the communist scare. There are contradictory reports about that. Sometimes the same writers are quoted as saying they really did mean to sneak in moral lessons about McCarthyism, and elsewhere they're saying they didn't. But John Carpenter's "They Live" was a pretty conspicuous allegory about Reagan Republicanism of the 80s. It still works. Hilarious, too, when you look at it that way.

Well. Stephanie Meyers and her roommate. If I've got her age correct, back then the term "psychic vampire" started circulating among the young intelligentsia. I heard it a lot. People were beginning to think a fair number of their friends were insecure and parasitical.

So there's the theme behind current vampire stories and the movies they've been spinning: a fear of being "sucked dry" by, say "codependent" people who won't go away, yet at the same time are usually incredibly sexy or otherwise mysteriously appealing.

What say?

Mr. Ebert,
I too wish you the best of luck in your pursuit.

As a non-native English speaker studying in an English speaking country, I can attest to knowing exactly how it feels to not be seen or heard, or to be 'talked down to' and being "the village idiot" in group conversations/discussions, whether by design or benign neglect. So many times I too have ended up having conversations with myself inside my head :) Talk about having a voice yet unable to use it cause it's encoded in a different language. Then again, I must admit as an uber-introvert/loner, who often spends days, weeks, and sometimes months on end happily without uttering a single word (being in grad school lets you do that, especially in the summer), I think talking is (kinda sorta) overrated, and would have irrefutably preferred to--and still do--write as a way to express myself, or claim my voice anyway.

But I realize yours is a much different situation than where I am coming from, as my vocal cords are fully intact, even if highly under-utilized, so I can still choose to speak up if I wanted to, and I hope you find and get to reclaim just the right kind of speaking voice in one way or another. Till then, I will echo many others and say how much I appreciate and enjoy 'hearing' your wonderfully eloquent and truly incomparable voice in writing, which as someone upthread has said, I too can hear loud and clear everytime I read your reviews and blog entries.

Oh and I've been waiting for your review of "thirst" whole summer, and was very happy to finally see it posted. I hope you'll review "mother" (by Bong Joon-ho) in the near future, too. As a quarter-aged Korean woman living in Urbana (can you guess what 'oaksusu' means in Korean?), I get uber-excited (and squeal in delight!) whenever I see your review of Korean movies.

Ebert: I loved "Mother" at Cannes. It will open this autumn, I believe.

Let me guess. In Utrbana, you're working as a house cleaner?

How old is "quarter-aged?"

You go months and never speak? Not even to call your family, 아이 은혜 ?

Dear Roger,

Earlier this week I was reading some of your reviews and, I swear, I started thinking about your loss of the ability to speak. I wondered how you were coping with, dealing with the marked slowing down of communication. Yes, yes, I remember your wit on the Siskel & Ebert show, on Howard Stern, whenever you spoke. You are an articulate, quick-thinking, quick-delivering man.

Your post above answered my questions, for the most part. What metaphysical connection ties readers to favored writers? Surely the receptors for such have evolved as a high-level cognitive function in some of the more intelligent homo sapiens.

Your editor's suggestion that you blog, I've observed, has allowed you to engage in conversations of a kind that approximates in some ways the banter of a free-wheeling discussion. Huzzah for that, I say. The number of comments here must be gratifying.

Yet, fluid, fluent, associative conversations are, at least for now, not possible for you. For this, I am sad. What I mean is, I feel empathy for you, and for your loved one and close friends.

My relationship with you has been largely as a reader. I've been, continue to be, a follower of your movie reviews and essays. There are many times when you go deep and your clarity of language is on the top shelf of writers. Especially when you contemplated themes of redemption and change. You are a deep-thinking Darwinian with an understanding of orthodox Catholicism... of the Christian-Judeo ethic.

So, for me, my relationship with your through your writings continues as before, but with the added benefit of this blog, which has been a treat to read.

Warm regards,

Dennis Freire

I grew up watching you on TV (Ebert & Roeper--I am only 17 years old so I was too young to remember Siskel & Ebert), and I am so excited for you!

I wish you all the best and look forward to hearing you again :)

Well, Roger, I know you can't wait to have this personal, intimate reveal turn into the "Why I *Heart* Vampires Thread", so here's my take:

As you said, people use movies (and stories in general) as a cloak for their desires. A Dracula cape covers a whole lotta desire. Apparently people equate eternal undeath with youth, wealth, happiness, vengance, whatever you want that you think you can't have. Committing mass murder seems a small price to pay, am I right?

Dracula considered the most important fact about himself not that he was a vampire, but that he was a Count--royalty. Vampirism is just a method of "preserving" what you find best about yourself, or a method to achieve something you find out of reach as a mere mortal. That it works about as well and attractivly as a pickled snake in formaldahyde in the long run--most people don't think that far ahead.

BMight explain cryogenics.

For what it's worth, I've been hearing you loud and clear this whole time. Your voice has only become stronger in recent years.

Tim

Roger, Thanks for taking this issue public. Your discussion of your frustration on your blog will hopefully drive someone to create a solution for many who cannot speak aloud.

Dear Roger,
Please don't think me too forward when I call you by your first name- it is how I think of you. I read your reviews and your blog, and everything of yours that I can find. I cried when you lost your ability to speak- as I would cry if one of my family or dear friends was injured so.
You lost your ability to speak, Roger- never your voice. When I read your words, I hear your voice. Your voice moves me. Agree, disagree, or bear an opinion that falls in neither realm compared to yours- I am moved. I am moved by the absolute passion in your voice. You articulate a vision with your voice that I can only hope to do with mine.
I am inspired by your quest to find a way to speak again, as I am often inspired by you. I know that it is terribly important to you, and so for this you have my kindest thoughts- which is the most powerful gift that I know how to give you. I hope that a brilliant solution presents itself to you. I hope that your quest has the greatest of happy endings. But know this, Roger- the one thing that someone like you is incapable of losing is their voice. Yours is too well thought, well reasoned, well intentioned, well read, and well loved to ever be lost to the world.

Thank you for your words and the inspiration you give the world with them.

Ebert: I loved "Mother" at Cannes. It will open this autumn, I believe.

Awesome! I saw it back in May while visiting home in Korea and loved it too. I'd still look forward to hearing your take on it!

Let me guess. In Utrbana, you're working as a house cleaner?

Hee. I wish I were a cleaner, cause then, maybe I could clean up all this clutter and mess inside me as well.

How old is "quarter-aged?"

Quite old but not that old to be considered 'middle-aged.' [cough]mid-30s[/cough]

You go months and never speak? Not even to call your family, 아이 은혜 ?

Well, yeah, sorta kinda. It's really not that hard actually. I 'talk' via emails, and I write and send letters and cards by mail (yeah, I really am one of those few people who still write hand-written letters and cards). I just prefer not to use my speaking voice unless I have to, cause I just don't like um... talking that much. [shrug] I'd much rather shut up, listen/read/watch and imagine! (heh, I wonder why I like movies :)

Incidentally, 'oaksusu', my chosen moniker for this blog, means 'corn' in English (Urbana=cornfield :) On the other hand,
"아이" means a 'child,' and "은혜" means 'grace,' and I'm wondering why you used that phrase at the end of your last question?

Ebert: You caught me cheating. I looked up "ungrateful child" in Korean and was misinformed. Same dictionary told me "oaksusu" meant "maid." I'll have to find a better dictionary.

Do you ever eat in restaurants? How do you order? I'm fascinated.

Roger, you've always had a very distinctive speaking voice, and a very distinctive writing voice, and the two fit together so well that I usually have no difficulty reading your reviews and other writings in your voice in my head. Or in what sounds, in my head, like your voice. Or something. I don't know that podcasts in a synthetic voice would be an improvement. But last night I watched your comments on the Grave of the Fireflies DVD, and it sure was good to see you in that old balcony seat again.

Remember Ebertfest 2005, when you were introducing After Dark, My Sweet and the audience wouldn't let you finish because we thought you'd spoil the plot? If something crazy happens to the spacetime continuum and we all get to relive that scene, you can talk as long as you want.

Reply to: Ebert: now I'm using Sonia Impact, which are LOUD. I crank up the volume and butt right in, just as everyone else does. This may be rude but it's a great relief. But on those occasions I've appeared in public or on TV with a computer voice, I nevertheless sound like Robby the Robot. Eloquence and intonation are impossible. I dream of hearing a voice something like my own.

Most of the comments have focused on hearing a podcast of a written review. But that's not the problem presented here.

Eloquence and intonation... in a conversation....

I can't see that it's possible to keep up with a conversation if you have to type each word. I'm a fairly fast typist, and as I watch my words appear in the comment box, I'm thinking it would be unlikely that anyone would wait for me to finish...

A Tablet PC offers a faster input, but still not fast enough.

The only way I see to accomplish the goals... is to compose a list of complete sentences. There can be menus for MP3 files,

Mr. Ebert,

I find myself extremely depressed after reading this entry. Selfish as it may sound, I am sad to learn that I will never again hear your speaking voice. I wish I could say that I have been a fan of yours since the days of Siskel and Ebert, but I have not. I am in my early twenties, and I just discovered your brilliance a mere five years ago.

I even remember the first review of yours that I ever read. It was “November,” in case you were wondering.

I find you to be an inspiration, my inspiration. It seems impossible that a person could make movie reviews into art, but your reviews are like poetry.

I do not know how familiar you are with facebook, but there is a section to list favorite quotes. Every quote that I have listed belongs to you.

I guess I always dreamed that someday I would be able to meet you and tell you what you have meant to me. Just to be able to speak to you for one minute would be the highlight of my entire life.

So selfishly, I mourn not only your loss but my loss.

Ebert: Won't work for me. I just plain ain't gonna never speak no more.

Never,never,never,never,never,never.....in another sense there ain't no never. Nichiren states:Winter always changes into spring. Its like I ain't never gonna be young again.

Ebert: Now you have improved on the saddest sentence in all of drama.

Ebert: You caught me cheating. I looked up "ungrateful child" in Korean and was misinformed. Same dictionary told me "oaksusu" meant "maid." I'll have to find a better dictionary.

Heehee. Most definitely, throw away that dictionary RIGHT NOW! I did wonder what part of my original post could possibly have made you think I was a house cleaner. Those words, 'oaksusu' and a variety of Korean words meaning 'maid,' are not even remotely similar! Man, I truly hope you've never referred to that god-awful wordbook in any of your Korean movie reviews.

Do you ever eat in restaurants? How do you order? I'm fascinated.

Um... rarely. I feel exhausted and drained when thrust into (new and unfamiliar) social situations, so no, I don't go out much any more. Fascinating? Hardly. I'm just one of many who are 'screwed up in their heads' and who are perhaps trying, in their own ineffectual ways, to make amends to get by. Or I could be wrong, and maybe I'm just a self-absorbed "ungrateful child" wallowing in the luxury of an uncommunicative, withdrawn state of mind. How’s that for a hedge? :)

Ebert: I feel like someone in a comedy using a lousy phrase book that has me insulting the locals.

Alone and in a country where I don't speak the language (except for please, thanks, taxi, pizza and where's the toilet?), I find myself quite contented not to speak. But I read. One of my great pleasures is sitting in a cafe in a strange land, sipping a coffee, immersed in a good book or the latest newspaper, or sometimes sketching. Drawing is a world beyond words.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/01/theres_a_small_cafe.html

So I understand happily being silent as a choice (as a necessity, not so much). Since you write well, this could become a blog: "The Journal of a Silent Woman." I sense that there's a great deal of depth in your life.

Roger...

Have you considered having various "interrupt phrases" at the ready, to be launched with a single click? That would allow you to interact with conversations in more or less real time, without getting lost in translation delays. Sure, people would still have to wait while you typed the next sentence before continuing, but you would be in the loop instead of in the dark. Possible candidates could include.
"Yes, but..."
"On the other hand..."
"Have you also considered this..."
"Hey, wait a minute!"
"That's quite possibly the dumbest thing I ever heard. Here's why..."
etc.

Ebert: I often have need of, "That's quite possibly the dumbest thing I ever heard. "

Roger...

Personal note...

Do you type on a Mac or a PC? If you use or have access to a PC, I would like to send you a software program I have developed. This is mainly intended for teaching people who do not already type, but it can also improve speed and accuracy for people like you who type a lot. The original Typing Tutor I created with Bill Gates for Microsoft many years ago was just the beginning.

More info at www.qwerty.com

Ebert: Sorry, only a Mac. But thanks! I'm sure others will go there.
If you are interested, just send me your preferred surface mail address and I'll send you a CD. I don't want to clutter your in box.

Regards...

...Dick Ainsworth
...ainsworth@qwerty.com

Roger,
I searched a bit and found a couple of possibilities. Not sure how evolved these are, but they may be worth investigating.
First, I found this article which noted how some companies are trying, with varied results, to allow you to create TTS in your own voice:http://www.texttospeechblog.com/2008/07/creating-your-own-voice.html

Cepstral's voiceforge:http://cepstral.com/cgi-bin/news?page=2007-02-20-00

Oki's Polluxstar:http://www.oki.com/en/press/2008/07/z08050e.html

Also, part of my job is assisting college students with disabilities. At our last statewide conference, some of my colleagues demonstrated a new TTS application they are working on with computer students in that school. While it's not what you are seeking, they may possibly be the people to have the skill and interest to work with you on a project. I could put you in touch with the project leader, if you're interested.

Until reading this blog post, I still thought your voice loss was temporary. I'm sorry to hear it is permanent.

You seem to be mostly concerned right now with improving the cadence and expressiveness of computer-synthesized speech, but you may also want to look for ways to increase the rate at which you can communicate via typing. People routinely speak at a rate of 150 or more words per minutes, and even if you're a fast typist, you're probably significantly slower than that. You might want to look into stenography machines like the ones made by Stenograph. There's also a Dutch company that makes a "chording keyboard" called a "veyboard" which supposedly enables typing speeds at up to 200 WPM, but I don't know much about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velotype

I happen to know a software engineer in India named Arun Mehta who develops systems that enable disabled people to communicate via speech. (He developed the system that Stephen Hawking uses.) His software uses artificial intelligence that learns to guess people's intentions from context as they type so they don't have to spell out every word in its entirety. I think his approach is mostly geared to people like Hawking who can't use a normal keyboard, but you might find it interesting in any case. Here are a couple of links in case you'd like to know more about his work:

http://www.youtube.com/user/arunmehtain#play/all/uploads-all/2/l7eMoA3cr8E

http://shuchi-edblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/skid-dr-arun-mehtas-open-source.html

Ebert: I feel like someone in a comedy using a lousy phrase book that has me insulting the locals.

Insulting, nope, hilarious, yep--your explanation [where you thought oaksusu=maid] did give me my first LOL of the day. For what it's worth, I always thought if I were given a choice to be born again as an inanimate object, I'd merrily be a self-cleaning magic oven.

Alone and in a country where I don't speak the language (except for please, thanks, taxi, pizza and where's the toilet?), I find myself quite contented not to speak. But I read. One of my great pleasures is sitting in a cafe in a strange land, sipping a coffee, immersed in a good book or the latest newspaper, or sometimes sketching. Drawing is a world beyond words.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/01/theres_a_small_cafe.html

Yes indeed. There is much to be said about the wonder of living in the background, quiet and invisible.

So I understand happily being silent as a choice (as a necessity, not so much). Since you write well, this could become a blog: "The Journal of a Silent Woman." I sense that there's a great deal of depth in your life.

Thank you. You are very kind. One of the most interesting things about 'meeting' new people is that you get to see yourself through their different and new eyes. It's not always flattering, but without fail I find it intriguing, if not curiously confusing.

Ebert: Maybe it's not a blog. Maybe it's an essay for Salon or someplace.

Tom Dark Wrote:
"Here's what I've got so far: Bram Stoker's DRACULA caught fire in the 19th C because it was an allegory for the parasitical behavior of the royalty of the day.."

Interesting take on the vampire in popular culture, Tom, but without some evidence to support, it does seem like you are projecting your own ideals on Bram Stoker's book. If Dracula's initial appeal was due to frustrations about the caste system of the day, then surly Stoker's contemporaries would have made that observation before.

The critiques of Dracula that I'm most familiar with tend to focus on the conflict between the modern world (which was London) and the old world (which was Transylvania). Stoker wasn't writing a period piece, he was writing about his age: the age of scientific discovery. You'll note that Van Helsing has several very long passages about the nature, and fallacies of, modern science. It could be reasonably argued that Dracula was a work of science fiction and that Bram Stoker like the Michael Crichton of his era.

This was also the age of cholera, and Lucy's drawn out death and repeated blood transfusions were quite reminiscent of the treatments prescribed at the time. Stoker has admitted that he was inspired by the tales of his mother's battle with cholera, and certainly his mother's experience was a common one in Victorian England. Take another look at the book after you've researched the history of miasma theory, and I think you will find there are many more relevant parallels.

But I shouldn't be so harsh. We each see what we want in stories, and I'm sure Dracula's enduring popularity speaks to the many different ways we could interpret the novel.

(PS - I also believe Dracula was a "sleeper hit", not a sensation at the time. It didn't become popular until many years after it's initial release, when Bela Legosi performed it to great acclaim on the London stage)

Perhaps there could be pitch changes according to different punctuation. For instance, I think I have a kind of scale, from lowest to highest here:

1. ( ) The parenthesis. When coming upon one and the words in between them, there's a lowering in pitch while in the brackets.
This pitch is a pitch below:

2. The normal pitch. This changes on the type of sentence it is. This is referring to the Declarative sentencnes, normal, not the question mark, a little higher; exclamation a little higher than question mark.

Ex. I am fine.
I am fine? ( a little higher pitch)
I am fine! (a little higher again)

3. The quotation marks. The pitch goes just a shade higher than normal.

4. The italics. The pitch goes just a shade higher than the quotations.

5. The question mark, as mentioned earlier.

6. The exclamation mark, as mentioned earlier.

7. The dash. The pitch stretches its most when coming upon the dash. It even adds a little extra pitch to all the others, including itself. For example, to add a dash to an exclamation mark (the two highest pitches on the list) without context and you have the two highest pitches adding together. Example, "I know--it really is good!" And as I said, it can add to others and itself, kind of like Foghorn Leghorn, "I say--I say, hold on a-minute." Sometimes however, the dash represents a normal pitch, when there is a kind of stutter. Example (these dashes represent no change in pitch): "I-I-I like to watch."

Greetings Roger and fellow readers!

In the spirit of battling adversity, I'd like to let people know that the 15th Sarajevo Film Festival is underway. The festival began in the throes of the horrific Balkan War of the 1990's, literally as the city was being shelled.

This year's ediiton opened with the highly-regarded Romanian film "Tales From The Golden Age" and will close with the acclaimed American movie "The Wrestler" on August 20.

Chris Alders
Nova Scotia, Canada

Last four films viewed: (1) The Triplets of Belleview; (2) Babel; (3) Tsotsi (4) When Harry Met Sally

With technology, I wonder if it wouldn't be possible at some point for a computer camera to "read lips" and instantly narrate what someone is saying.

In any case, no matter how you speak, we are all still listening to you.

Seems to me you've found your "computer-aided voice". It's your blog, and a powerful, unique voice it is too.

I'm surprised you, of all people, don't embrace the potential of current voice technology. I would think you would want to have a rotating core of cinematic robots ranging from Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, to the Borg from Star Trek to a Transformer. Switch 'em up depending on your mood.

Then, of course, you'd have to start every speech with "Klaatu Barada Nikto".

Hmmm. Your 'endless hours of recordings' has got me thinking.

I am not a text-to-speech expert of any kind, but I am an engineer in the internet industry with a keen interest in crowdsourcing. If you aren't familiar with crowdsourcing, one awesome example is reCAPTCHA, that little box with skewed images of two words that you have to type in to use many websites. Only one of the words is actually a test to make sure you aren't a web bot; the other word is scanned in from old print-only editions of the New York Times. In fact, every time you take one of these little tests you are helping to digitize the old newspapers. (See http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html for more info.)

You see where I'm going with this?

Ebert: That's sort of brilliant!

"Hope transforms pessimism into optimism. Hope is invincible. Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy. Hope is the sun. It is light. It is passion. It is the fundamental force for life's blossoming."...Daisaku Ikeda

There is a beautiful series of short animation films for children scripted by Daisaku Ikeda one of the best being Cherry Tree.It's book form:
http://www.ikedabooks.org/cherry_tree.html

I have my guess you may love these aforementioned films depending on their availability and your time and inclination. They are uplifting,inspiring,beautiful,simple and addressed to 4-12 age group but I am enjoying the DVDs.

I haven't seen "District 9" yet (waiting for it fall off the back of a truck) and I don't read that stupid Tomato critic everyone's grumbling about (why some people can't just walk away from a troll, is beyond me) and so I'm puttering about the blog these days, inventing my own amusements. Most recently, in the The New Yorker Caption Thread - 2 recipes: Timpano alla "Big Night" and "Death By Chocolate" - that one has video step-by-step instructions. :)

As for Roger's voice or lack thereof, I always hear it when I read his writing. Although sometimes, I like to pretend he's got a bunch of different voices (depending on the country where a film was made) for example; he was speaking with a French accent when he reviewed this:

THE BEACHES OF AGNES, I love the official trailer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUUq1HPE6IE

And just the other day, he was speaking in "film noir" when I read his piece at the bottom of the front page: great movies - In a Lonely Place (1950) "Bogart as an alcoholic loner with a girl he doesn't deserve." (he kinda soundedlike Joseph Cotton from "The Third Man", actually. :)

But whenever he's p*ssed-off about something - then he always sounds like Roger! Chuckle!

Anyhoo, I'm waiting for a bunch of movies to hit theaters. It'll be a while yet, but since I someone's already mentioned Vampires in here...smile...

Has anyone heard about this movie?!

"Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" - directed by Paul Weits with John C. Reilly:

http://www.thevampiresassistant.net/

"The Vampire's Assistant, based on the popular series of books by Darren Shan called The Saga of Darren Shan, is a fantasy-adventure about a teenage boy who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two warring factions of vampires. Pulled into a fantastic life of misunderstood sideshow freaks and grotesque creatures of the night, one teen will vanish from the safety of a boring existence and fulfill his destiny in a place drawn from nightmares." - wiki

Oooo! See? Now that's entertainment, dammit! None of this mindless Transformers crap! We're talking magic and cemeteries and creepy dudes and vampires and no, you can't turn into a bat, and all kinds of cool stuff! Oh and it's funny too. :)

I wish I could go see it right now - along with this one!

"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" - Terry Gilliam

Official trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXv9Kgb59xM&feature=related

"In the present day, immortal 1,000-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) leads a traveling theatre troupe — including a sleight of hand expert, Anton (Andrew Garfield), and a dwarf, Percy (Verne Troyer)— that offers audience members a chance to go beyond reality through a magical mirror in his possession. Parnassus had been able to guide the imagination of others through a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), who now comes to collect on the arrangement, targeting the doctor's daughter (Lily Cole). The troupe, which is joined by a mysterious outsider named Tony (portrayed by Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell), embark through parallel worlds to rescue the girl." - wiki

A Magic Mirror! Parallel worlds! Tom Waits as the DEVIL! (That's as good as Vampire.)

Gosh! And sign me up, eh?! Grin. I don't care if these two movies suck so badly they blow chunks. I've seen the trailers; they've got my money. Seriously; I'll go see a Vampire film if the Art Direction looks good, and I love Terry Gilliam on principle. But these don't look like they're gonna suck. I think "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" was shown at Cannes in fact, and the advanced buzz was good, no? It certainly was for "Thirst" - which won a prize, and Roger enjoyed.

The same of course, cannot be said for the upcoming "Twilight: New Moon"....as I think we can all smell that one, eh?

Official site: http://www.twilightthemovie.com/

Note: I like to imagine that Spike shows up with Drusilla (Buffy characters) and they kill each and every single last one of them and then Spike cracks a really funny joke about "Let The Right One In". :)

But wait! It gets even WORSE! How much worse than "New Moon" you ask..? The Twilight films have inspired an equally as insipid "new" Vampire series on the CW Network. That's right; angst-ridden Vampire drama for girls is now everywhere...!

"Vampire Diaries"

(I invite all to mock it with me! )

"For over a century, I have lived in secret - until now. I shouldn't have come home. I know the risk, but I had no choice. I have to know her..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbvxU4uUfXY

And here's my REBUTTLE to all these insipid girly angst-ridden stupid Vampire movie/TV shows pieces of crappage!

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed -- [original version]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwM3GvaTRM

"In this re-imagined narrative, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward's character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy's eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed - in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century." - Jonathan McIntosh, rebelliouspixels.com

Buffy kicks Edward's ass! And that was made by a GUY! Hurray! There's a light at the end of the tunnel. :)

Meanwhile...

Ebert wrote: I've been thinking a lot about vampire movies, and wondering why anyone would ever want to be, or even know, a vampire, or even like to think they exist.

Why? Well, since you asked... :)

I'm not interested in blood or watching it drip down someone's chin. Or cheesy, Halloween-type costumes trying to channel the Victorian Era. I don't like red lace, granny boots or black corsets, heavy make-up or eye-liner. I don't own a tube of red lipstick. I don't like the garish, vulgar, slutty or common. I'm not a fan of gratuitous graphic violence, either.

I like alchemy and dusty books and apothecary jars. I like old knowledge - the secrets you have to really dig for. In small shops mostly forgotten at the far end of alleys that have been, in their basements and near the back; I like looking there. I like hunting for treasures. Bits of time "captured" in a piece of iron, glass or stone. I like enjoying antiquity in the here and now. I like the contrast - for me, there's a visceral frisson to it, to standing next to something a thousand years old as you check your brand new watch.

Ever see a cat, hunt? It doesn't waste energy. It can't afford to. There's an economy of movement as a result, and which lends it such fluid animal grace. See it, kill it; done. No fanfare and no fuss. No desire to draw attention to itself. It came and now it's gone. Quietly.

At their best, when written well, Vampires can be a combination of the above. The things they've seen seen, the rise and fall of Kingdoms and empires - everything that never made it into a history book. A record of things, places and people held only in memory. Imagine the conversations you could have. And how splendid and beautiful the creature sitting there, its laconic presence studying you in turn, with questions of its own. Imagine the conversations - I do.

And therein lies the appeal. To sit there and gaze at something like me and yet not for being something else entirely, while hearing stories no one else has - not living, anyway. To marvel at tiny deft movements achieving so much, every gesture streamlined.

If you could watch a shark swim or a dog run around someone's front yard, which would draw your gaze? I say the shark. Predators have this timeless and innate appeal because of how they move and carry themselves. It's why a sleek sports car makes you turn your head and a minivan doesn't. And therein also lies the sex appeal.

And why I like Vampires. All of the above.

But I don't want to be one! Zzzz. Death gives life meaning. And I hate most Hollywood Vampire/horror movies; they're usually just an excuse for gore, blood, etc. The Art Direction for the Underworld films was nicely done, but it's still just a bunch of fight scenes.

I liked classically trained English actor Guy Flanagan as the original Mitchell the Vampire in the pilot for "Being Human" on BBC3. He reminded me slightly of a young David Thewlis; similar qualities.

You know, nothing is quite so attractive, as when you can see there's a light on upstairs. A sharp, quick mind that can navigate through the thoughts inside it, like a shark along a reef, displays an equally as appealing economy of movement which also lends it a certain grace. Note: Thewlis is a damn good writer, by the way. His novel - "The Late Hector Kipling" - brilliant, loved it.

P.S. one of the reason's I like F. W. Murnau's Vampire, Nosferatu, is that the character manages to engages my empathy despite every reason he shouldn't. Like Frankenstein, there's more to a good monster than just his appearance. There's "why" he was made to be so ugly in the first place.

Films like Twilight totally miss the point.

"I have a video of basic sign language, but alas it's no help in the world at large."

Hey Roger,

Sign language alone would not help but learning to speak in ASL and arranging to have ASL interpreters at business meetings and social gatherings could eventually bring you back to being able to banter with others again.

Miguel

Ebert: I can hear just fine, thank God.

This is in bad taste, but I found it funny: an episode of Kenny vs. Spenny where the competition is to see who can go the longest without speaking; Kenny uses a computer voice to get around the rules. Hilarity ensues.

The funny bit starts at 1:13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPidIRnvSS8

Hey Roger,

Nice piece on alternative communication. If you'd like an historical perspective on voice synthesis go here:

http://aac-rerc.psu.edu/index-11439.php.html

We've come a long way on this but still have a long way to go.

Michael

Ebert: Maybe it's not a blog. Maybe it's an essay for Salon or someplace.

Alas, I fear you overestimate the depth of my psyche and my writing.
Staying mum helps keep the real me, a blabbering mess and a flake, under wraps, and writing helps me maintain a veneer of normalcy [read: pretend to be articulate, interesting and intelligible]. I must be getting better at 'faking.' :)

Besides, I'm just too insecure and shallow to put myself out there at the mercy of everyone else. Most of the times, I'm not even sure what I mean when I talk, er, I mean, write, and being open and sharing (and commented on) only makes me feel even more exposed and vulnerable. But then there are those rare occasions, like now, when it becomes such a joy. And that is good enough for me.

Ebert: I think you have a pessimistic idea about what you have to say. Your very doubts are what are interesting--those, and your ability to express them. I think you'd be surprised at the support you'd find from readers. Support, and gratitude from those who identify.

To answer Jay's question: "What does Stephen Hawking use? It is robotic to be certain, but he isn't typing what he says, so where do the words originate?" He uses a cheek muscle. You can see bits of his synthesizer at work around the 8:40 mark in this video:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe.html

It's amazing he manages to write books like that...

Ebert: Presumably his software could use a better voice?

Dear Roger,

I agree with you completely. You can get along without a lot of things, like walking, moving around, swallowing and even eating, but the humanizing factor is to be able to communicate with your fellow human beings. Without speech you are unable to bond with people and are alone, even in a room full of people.

I was diagnosed with ALS in 1994 and waited to die for six years. Of course, I am happy to still be around and able to communicate with the computer. I have several friends and my family, and would love to tell them all a simple "Thank you," for just being there.

I have tried several speech devices and been disappointed. I am happy you have found a new one and will closely follow your progress for a speech substitute.

Good luck and love,
Pat Lockwood

Ebert: I clicked on your website and was very impressed by your paintings. The watercolors are amazing.

Have you had any luck with computer voices?

There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,
As who should say 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!'
O my Antonio, I do know of these
That therefore only are reputed wise
For saying nothing; when, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,
Which, hearing them, would call their brothers fools..

Merchant of Venice

Not only do you have countless hours of your speech, but if the closed captioning was done reasonably well and you also have rights to those transcripts, you have both sides of the equation. It does seem like a pretty valuable resource -- one that you could donate to science, if only you could find the right people doing "speech synthesis" research.

I know those large bodies of data are useful for developing certain kinds of computer software. For example, the Hansard (official record) of the Parliament of Canada, which is both huge and carefully translated (given the legal requirements for the equality of English and French), is often used to "train" French/English translation programs.

For now, I can see why you wouldn't want to use computer voices for public speaking. But couldn't your computer be hooked up to allow you to either be "subtitled" (allowing the audience to read what you type) or "dubbed" (with a professional reading it on your behalf)? Both solutions are used, even with some delay, for speakers in another language -- why shouldn't typing qualify?

Ebert: Since writing the entry, I have been given some hope for a program based on my own voice.

Hello,
I'm Jean-Michel Reghem and I'm Product Manager at Acapela Group, a European Text-to-speech

As David Niemeijer told you in a post above, we have TTS voices for Mac OS X. Online demo is available here: http://demo.acapela-group.com
This is Infovox iVox and is integrated in the Speech Synthesis Manager. It means these voices will be available directly for applications which are using Speech Synthesis Manager API (as products from AssistiveWare, Kurtzweil, Crick, Claro etc... ... but also for all your softwares, through the speech services (like the Alex voice).

But I understand that your main need is to have your own voice ...
We, at Acapela, have a solution for you, through our Acapela Voice Factory service:
http://www.acapela-group.com/acapela-voice-factory-5-speech-solutions.html

Please have a look at this page ... there is sample of what we can do, in 3 different quality (and budget).

If you need more information about feasibility and pricing, contact us with the form: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-speech-contact.html

Hope this help

Jean-Michel Reghem

Ebert: Thank you. I've gone to your site and am checking it out.

Ebert: I think you have a pessimistic idea about what you have to say. Your very doubts are what are interesting--those, and your ability to express them. I think you'd be surprised at the support you'd find from readers. Support, and gratitude from those who identify.

Again, thank you for your kind and encouraging words. On a scale of life dispositions, I may very well be leaning towards perpetual pessimism--perpetually brooding, perpetually questioning, perpetually doubting, perpetually hesitating, and perpetually uncertain... This kind of obsessive thinking is something that the academia (where I now reside) encourages, but admittedly it gets absurd, ridiculous and very tiring at times, sometimes intensely so.

But I digress. And I apologize for taking up your blog space to yammer on about... wait, what were we talking about? That's right--Voice, a speaking voice to be more exact. Having 'heard' from those who once had but now lost their voice (and want it back), being the one who has a fully functioning voice but rarely uses it (by choice), now I'm curious... about what those who never had it to begin with might say about this quest of 'finding one's own voice.' (oh, let the brooding begin... :)

Ebert: Yet for all of that you sound far from depressed.

Dearest Roger,

I can't believe the rudeness of people who would not wait for your reply via written note! Come on, it only takes a minute! Don't they know that you are Roger Ebert, writer extraordinaire? I have to admit I would wait patiently and silently for hours if necessary to receive a written note from you. Your opinion is priceless!

Take care,

Amy

Your reader oaksusu reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi, from what Gandhi revealed in his autobiography: “All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

Here’s a link to the Edgar Lee Masters poem “Silence”: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Edgar-Lee-Masters/15865

Here are six great lines, among many:

And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
We cannot speak.

You bring up an important issue that impacts the lives of literally millions of people who use augmentative and alternative means of communication to help them speak. Current speech synthesis technologies are developed to represent the *other person*: help-center personality, ticketing assistant, or the polite email reader, to name a few. Not enough work has been done in this area for individuals to use it as their voice; to represent them while they interact with others. There are a couple of recent developments that may help out though. The Modeltalker project: http://modeltalker.com is a speech synthesis package that "voice-banks" human speech to be used as your voice at a later time. They may be able to assist you in developing your synthesized voice. Second, the Assistive Technology Industry Association (which is meeting in Chicago in October, by the way)my be a good group of people to try to influence to develop better synthesized voices (http://atia.org). Finally, the Rehabilitation and Engineering Research Center for Communication Enhancement (http://aac-rerc.com) is engaged in research and development in some of the areas that you mentioned.

Hope this is helpful.

I hope you soon get to butt in to your heart's content!

Roger, I am deeply touched by your words and the words of others on this blog, covering so many aspects of your personal and professional journey. Rarely do I write a "fan" letter, yet all here seem to be so deeply connected by our love of cinema, and even the occasional Hollywood blockbuster, and most certainly the professional relationships that you had with Gene and Richard, and, unquestionably, your stellar contributions to the arts, media and publishing. I can still hear Siskel and Ebert reviews replay in my head, staying up late as a teen, and simply wanting to do what you were doing. Your show would play at various times, but it was always midnight-ish in Ottawa in the 1980s. As others have said so much better, you have had such a huge influence on my love of cinema, that I just wanted to say God bless, having followed your health updates from afar, and to say "thank you". I want to thank the people in your life for sharing Roger Ebert with a global community, and continue to do so. Roger, may you know that you are loved and so, so, so well regarded amongst us lay people, that I hope that your next published work might be your autobiography. I can only imagine that it would be even more of an inspiration to us all. Blessings, Dan

Ebert: I was much pleased.

Much the way I felt during the opening credits of On Golden Pond when the camera panned over a copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian with a cover story saluting Norman Thayer's retirement from Penn, IIRC.

Dear Roger,

Let me give you thought or two on ASL:

First, I think you missed Miguel's point regarding American Sign Language (ASL). My sister is deaf, and I can assure you that with ASL she communicates rather well with the rest of the family and her friends.

I know it is difficult to accept the thought that, barring a breakthrough in technology, the best way for you to communicate in public is to learn a new languange. Nonetheless, you would be amazed at the fluidity and flexibility of ASL. [There are are lots of signs for curse words, and I am sure my sister would be happy to teach them to you].

Now, Miguel's point of having an ASL interpreter at business meetings and conferences is valid. You would not have "your voice" per se, but you would definitely have your "own" voice at said meetings. And, you would have an advantage over every deaf person in that you would not need a simultaneous translation of what everyone else is saying. Your interpreter could concentrate only in vocalizing what you wanted to say.

Best of all, while learning a new language is never easy; getting an ASL teacher should be very simple. ASL is taught everywhere in the US.

You can call using a TTY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Telecommunications_device_for_the_deaf) almost any college in America and find an ASL teacher quickly.

And think of your fans. While many rhapsodize about your "voice" what they really miss are your thoughts.

And maybe, just maybe, there is a TV show someplace where you can once again expound eruditely about films... in ASL, while your interpreter reaches the hearing audience with your innermost thoughts.

Here is one fan wishing you the best on your search for yor true voice.

Your plight is well known to many now. I hope one of these computer speech innovators will create the Roger voice for you, gratis. I would think that would not be impossibly hard given the many hours of your voice recorded in the archives. What better way to show off their prowess as programmers?

Oddly, when I set up my hands-free phone device for the car, I chose the British-accented robo-voice because it was easiest to understand.
Roger, there are voices and there are "voices." Yours is unique, even if it isn't verbal. It is our great good luck as consumers of Ebertisms that the concept of blogging flowered at the same time your voice was withering. You are very good at this. Just not at New Yorker cartoon captions.

Hey Roger, I hope this works out for you. While they're at it, I imagine an Ebert-O-Matic wouldn't be too much to ask, right?

Ebert: Heaven help me!

Thank you, Roger. I miss your voice terribly, so I can only imagine how painful that is for you.

I have been using MacBooks for years, not knowing about the Speech program. After reading your post, I had Alex read it to me too.

I teach third grade. Several students at my school come to me a year or two behind in reading. While I read with them daily at their instructional level, I also want them to be able to follow along with text that is at grade level and higher when we do research. I can put a pair of headphones on them and let Alex read along with them. Thanks for turning me on to this amazing software!

Like most of my generation (that’s X) I came to know Roger Ebert as the chubby guy that argued with the bald guy about movies. Although I occasionally found ‘At the Movies’ to be insightful (these guys turned me on to Woody Allen) I took for granted that the producers were exploiting the clown factor of Siskel and Ebert.

As I got older I became a movie lover. I spent some time in Romania, where everyone seems to love Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, despite my efforts to show them the error of their ways. In the end it was them that helped me realize this: if one has the freedom and the luxury to criticize the quality of their entertainment, chances are they know very little about struggle. While we were bitching about ‘Bloodsport’, they were watching family members being dragged off to prison for bitching about Ceausescu. Suddenly my negative opinions of Van Damme and Seagal made me feel like an elitist. These two men were bringing a little bit of joy into otherwise difficult lives. Maybe they knew more about the magic of cinema then us snobs.

I didn’t take enough books with me to Romania, but occasionally I had access to the internet. It was then that I discovered Roger Ebert’s Website. And I was amazed at how eloquently the man could write. In comparison to someone like, say, Peter Travers, Ebert was a Truman Capote. In the written reviews of Roger Ebert I see, not an elitist, but a literate man who is fascinated with movies. He helped me to stop being ashamed of liking Barton Fink.

I can feel Ebert’s pain when he writes about how well he used to verbally express himself. Maybe so, but it wasn’t until I discovered Roger Ebert, the writer, that I came to respect the man. Let me say this to him: like all great writers, you have found your voice in your writing; that is how the world should know and remember you. Good luck searching for an audible voice, but don’t fret if you never find it.

It's a small world: CereProc's offices are only a stone's throw away from where I saw ASIMO, Honda's robot, at the Edinburgh Science Festival a few months ago.* I guess the TTS guys were left out because it's more like cybernetics than robotics. Our local Cafe Scientifique seems to have deflated, so I might get the ball rolling again by inviting CereProc to do a talk. Thanks for being a font of surprising finds as usual!

*http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=11+Crichton+Street,+Edinburgh&sll=55.945355,-3.186765&sspn=0.0118,0.039053&g=eh8+9le&ie=UTF8&ll=55.944682,-3.186808&spn=0.004422,0.009645&t=h&z=17

The arrow is CereProc, the large domed building to the northwest was hosting ASIMO.

Hi, Mr. Ebert.

I live in Sweden and I'm a big fan of your work. My goal in life is to become a film critic and you and Mr. Roeper and of course Mr. Siskel are my inspirations. Your work means a great deal to me and I visit both yours and Mr. Roeper's web sites every single day. (A while ago I started reviewing films for a Swedish film site and was given the chance to attend a couple of critic screenings. That made my happiness complete.)

I was thrilled to read this article and I hope everything works out well!

Take care! You make the movies so much more fun.

Dear Roger,
You already know about the text insertion software but there is also another possibility, although the learning curve is steeper, a Stenotype machine, like what the court reporters use. This would allow you to speak in (almost) real time. Also, what about the movie studio's special effects teams, surely they could come up with something. Just a thought. Also, what others have said is true, when we read your reviews, we hear you clear as a bell. Take care, and be well... John O'Grady ivanogre@gmail.com

I just saw this crazy keyboard on a list of most ergonomic keyboards: Datahand. I read some reviews and it sounds great.

Roger, since you'll be typing a lot more, RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome might become an issue, you should look into getting a cool new keyboard. I'd hate for you to start feeling a lot of pain typing.

Eternal life, youth and beauty; ability to resist the erosion of time; the ultimate conquest of our mortality - a parallel of certain ideals that are valued in our society, no?

Eternal until Buffy stakes you.

Roger I hope they can get that software created for you at a price you can afford, and please don't let anybody make you feel like the village idiot. Call me silly but I think there's something poetic about being silent.
Best Wishes.

I know that this is not the main topic of this thread but I have one observation on the 2001 clip. I've always thought it was eerie that HAL was made/born in Urbana, which is the place where the web browser was invented (along with several other internet tools). It is quite possible that this is not notable at all and that I am in fact a complete and total dorkwad. I can't stop thinking that Stanley Kubrick could travel in time and he knew that a HAL-like entity would be made in Urbana. That being said you would think he'd have the decency to travel to the year 2000 and stop AI from being made.

Hi Roger
I had the privilege of saying hello to you in the lobby/concession area this year during the intermission of Woodstock at Ebertfest. That was my first trip to Ebertfest and a memory I'll never forget.

I was really excited to read about your search for a computer voice that's a little more you. Like so many others, I've felt that it hasn't been the same since you left your TV program, although I'm so grateful I still get to read your work in print.

I think it would be fantastic if there was a computer voice that literally used the soundbites from your past shows and commentaries to resurrect your true voice. I'm reminded of ebaumsworld.com, which uses celebrity soundboards to create funny conversations, often used as prank calls. If that same idea could be used for conversations of a more serious nature, I would think that'd be an amazing tool for you and many others. Of course, as you mentioned in your article, it's pricey. Some of us should get a collection together and make this happen for you.

I'm sure this won't surprise you and you've probably heard it a million times before, but I just feel the need to say it too-- you are a brilliant brilliant writer. No matter what you're writing about, your clarity of thought and seeming ease with order and pure curiosity about everything around you just absolutely stuns me. Every single time I read something you've written I sit back and think "Damn he can write."

This piece is particularly compelling because you've faced something so fundamentally frightening-- losing one's voice-- and shown how fear can be rationally dealt with. We've all missed your voice. I've listened to old shows just to hear it again. When I talk to my friends about movies, I try to sound just like you :).

Someone will surely figure this out.

I've let the 2001 clip play while typing this and it's about to make me cry-- I became operational in Champaign, Illinois, in 1960. I remember watching the film in Foellinger Auditorium and cheering with the crowd when Hal first says that line early in the film, but now I will also associate it with your quest for your voice.

Someone will surely figure this out for you. We can't wait.

Ebert: This is such a sweet post that I am reluctant to correct you. But as an Urbana boy, such is my duty.

Hal says he became operational in Urbana.

Oh, hell Roger, now I have this vision of somebody with a genius grant showing up on your doorstep looking for the perfect voice guinea pig. They could do worse. You know how people like to mine data. Whenever we needed a modification on software for a process at the university where I worked for many years, we learned to smile sweetly at the systems analysts and say "it's only a couple of lines of code."

Those of us whose memories go way back fell in love with the Gene and Roger show because of the witty repartee as well as the actual reviews. I remember you giving yourself permission to skip attending those horrid slasher movies, and maybe the karate ones with breaking pencils as sound effects. You would crack each other up. In my memory it happened more often than in reality I'm sure. The voice lives as you capture it via keyboard. I too hope you find a synthesis that satisfies you.

Vampires are primarily about sex. What was so wonderful about the tv Buffy/Angel the vampire thing was that Angel was the classic older boyfriend. Of course in this case she was 16 and he was 240. So many adolescent angst themes cloaked in creatures. And written so smartly with pop culture motifs. I recorded it weekly as a treat and break from studying, a middle-aged fart in law school at night.

Roger,

I wish you luck in your quest to regain your voice. As a fan of yours since your "Sneak Preview" days, it will indeed be a pleasure and a welcomed return to hear you once again.

In the meantime, rest assured that your "other" voice, the one with which you write that's every bit you, is as strong and clear and eloquent and witty and appreciated as ever. I am glad over the years that you have expanded your public writings to include other topics in addition to film. And like the gentleman from New Jersey who offered you those kind words above, I too regard you as a friend, one of nearly 30 years, though we've never met.

It's good to know that you can still communicate and write movie reviews but seeing you use machines to talk like Steven Hawking is just sad to look at. We really do miss your voice and we hope that you do manage to get it back soon, computer or no computer.

Dear Mr. Ebert,

How delighted I am to have stumbled across your post! The exact same ideas for voice replication have been a quest of mine for two years now after my husband's laryngectomy. You're right. It does sound so technologically reasonable. Not so, evidently. I have haunted every website I can think of for voice restoration or synthesis-anything!

I liked what you said about "Lawrence." We just found out about 'Alex' today, thanks to you. We have a Mac Leopard desk top and had no idea the damn thing could talk.

My husband was born in Stirling, quite near to Edinburgh but grew up in London. He can use an electrolarynx, with difficulty and lousy results but how he does miss his accent. You expressed the profound frustrations perfectly. He's a chatty and engaging man that is always ready with a pun or a quip and has felt so left out. He isn't the strong, "silent" type and a missed bon mot is a train that's just pulled out of the station. When it's gone it's gone. You hit that nail on the head too.

As you wrote and unlike yourself, there aren't hundreds of hours of his own recorded voice from which a template or library could be built. However, an astonishingly close match for him would be the late David Niven. Both had that light, pleasant baritone and Mr. Niven certainly would have left enough vocal footage behind to create a vocabulary body. Hmm...copyright problems? I doubt he'd mind. I believe that in his last movie, Mr. Niven himself had a voice double. Ironic, that.

Mr. Ebert, please keep us posted. When I finish this letter I'm going to read each and every post and link on this page. I'd love to hear your voice again and my sweetheart's too! Thank you, thank you, and thank you!

Ebert: There are some British accents available in addition to Lawrence, but no David Nivens! Best of luck.

Mr. Ebert,

Like so many of your readers, I wish you the best and sympathize with your travails. But as long as there are reviews with titles like "Nobody Understands Me, Nor Can They Endure My Tuba", your voice will ring clear to us!
PS: Who wouldn't sound better as David Niven? One could read the entire Taco Bell menu and make it sound posh.

I feel a little uneasy about the comment I posted on this entry, the one that said "If it were me, I'd probably just resort to either flipping people off or giving them the thumbs up, but in your case, the latter might make them think you were referring to a movie."

Reading it after I posted it, I couldn't tell if it sounded snide or mean. I just want you to know that my intention wasn't to make fun of your current predicament; it was to make you laugh. If it did offend you or piss you off, I'm sorry. You're not only my favorite critic but one of my favorite writers, and I hope to meet you one day and be able to tell you that in person. And I really do hope you find your voice again.

I have a bit of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I can certainly commisserate. I had throat surgery to remove a tumor myself, and while I can still speak, albeit with a defect, I can no longer ingest solid food. It is a struggle even to deal with puree-ed foods, leave me mostly to drink what I can eat.

As for my voice, I find it frustrating that the defect sometimes leaves some folks clueless about what I'm saying. Most frustrating of all, the people closest to me, including my life partner, are often the ones who seem to have the hardest time of it. So, I'm with you there.

On the other hand, from what I can tell, you can still enjoy Steak N'Shake, which I no longer can on my trips home to Galesburg.

Count your blessings. :)

Ebert: I can't eat or drink, but I can remember.

Oh, I didn't realize you could no longer eat or drink as well.

Man, that's tough. I suppose then you have a feeding tube? (Rhetorical; no response required/expected.) I had oen of those for a while, and it was not a lot of fun.

I can drink now, at least. I was surprised at how little I actually miss eating.

Still, at the end of the day, count your blessings. The alternatives of not having the surgery were much worse, I decided after the fact. I didn't really realize the potential side effects going into it, but then, maybe the doctors didn't really either, until they got in there and actually started working on it.

Hal become operational in Urbana and YOU became operational in Urbana, but I became operational in Champaign :) :) close enough that the clip makes me cry.

This has all been on my mind ever since I read your post. It seems to me that this would be a project someone would jump at-- someone in some theoretical linguistics engineering (just made that up) lab somewhere. Considering all the examples they'd have it seems like it would be fairly simple to index your vocabulary in a variety of inflections. It wouldn't have to be the entire English language-- just the Ebert lexicon. Then they could give the program context cues to help choose the correct inflection.

I'd bet there are actually a relatively small number of phrases we each use when speaking freely. For example-- as a young girl I noticed that my father always said, "Not as far as I know." He never said, "I don't know." Now I catch myself saying, "Not as far as I know."

If someone were to study your recordings they could give you shortcuts to phrases you use often-- or new phrases you'd like to use often now-- like "Wait, I wasn't done!!" My father and I would need "Not as far as I know" buttons.

And... then it becomes more natural. Like playing music. My father and I don't reason through the words when we say, "Not as far as I know"-- it's just there. As that button would be there once you learned how to play this instrument. And perhaps a certain combination of keys would give context or inflection just as certain combinations of keys give timbre on a musical instrument.

Anyway-- I think this is fascinating. I wish I could do it. Someone should do it and then while they're doing it someone should make a documentary.

Just some scattergun comments...

Roger:
Oddly enough, while I was playing around at the reCAPTCHA site that Suzanne J mentioned, one of the names that came up was McHugh! Later Jung and foucault (sic) came up together in the same box. There were other interesting combinations of two words that appeared that had or could seem to have meaning, not unlike the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. I'm going to start writing some of them down, and see if I can make a kind of "found" poetry out of them.

Oaksusu:
Write a blog. You write very well; you even have a good grasp of American slang. I'd be interested in reading about your experiences in the US.

More later...

Roger you are the man, I love you dude.
I'm not sure anyone mentioned it above, but a "Flash Soundboard" would work just great. Anyone with a high school students knowledge of flash programming (that leaves me out), could make one.

Check out : http://www.crocopuffs.com/soundboard/arnold.html

These work great for fake phone conversations with unknowing friends (or enemies). I would not doubt that someone would love to do this for you if you ask around. Sun Times must have IT staff that know about this stuff.
God bless you Mister Ebert, you're film reviews have been an important part of my life for many years.
Thank you.

If you are walking around giving interviews using a software companies AI/voice interface, surely they would hand this over for free in return for the massive exposure to their product.

The requested URL /forxru1/zadanie.txt was not found on this server.

Dearest, dearest Roger,

I still hear your voice. My mother watched you and Gene every week when I was growing up. When I grew up, I watched you and Richard, and while some of the fill-ins (never replacements) were pretty good, I never stopped missing you. I have several of your books, and while you are horribly wrong about JFK, you are still the person whose reviews I quote most often. Practically the only person whose reviews I quote at all. When I read them, when I read your blog, when I go back and read old reviews preparatory to writing my own for my Rotten Tomatoes page, I hear them all in your voice. I think possibly yours is the only writing I hear in its author's voice, even to the extent of e-mail from my loved ones. Make of that what you will.

All that said, I would love for you to have an actual voice again, for both your sake and my own. One of the prides of my DVD collection is Citizen Kane, of course, not least because of your wonderful commentary. Roger, I rented Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for you! Allow me to agree with the notion of a subtitled commentary "track"--I think I have now established that, no matter what film it was, I would watch it. I would probably even buy it.

I tell my friends that about the only person I know of who probably watches more movies a year than I is you, and I would not love movies nearly so much were it not for you. I have very fond memories of watching you and Gene with my family. I remember an episode you did about movies set in one place and filmed in another; you commented on how a film clearly wasn't made in Chicago, because mountains and palm trees were visible in the background, and my family all cheered, because it was a park about three miles south of my mom's house. The "true confessions" blog entry I wrote about film is called "Bless Me, Roger Ebert, for I Have Sinned." I started being fussy about widescreen when I was still collecting things on VHS thanks to you, and my opinion about colorization, blasphemy that it is, comes in part from you. (Also that it's silly-looking and wrong.) Even when I disagree with you, I am always interested in what you've written.

Thank you so very, very much. It breaks my heart to hear that you have lost your voice, but I promise you, you have always spoken to me; you always will.

Ebert: Thank you. In a real way, I feel I have a voice here.

I hear you perfectly. good luck on finding your physical voice back!

Roger,

I thought of some ideas that might streamline your communication process. You play the piano, so my idea is that using both hands in concert would speed things up, especially if your software and keyboard were customized to perform the task. Through a combination of the software, the keys, and the mouse (or finger pad) you could have a wealth of resources at hand.

I’m learning Spanish right now and I read books in Spanish with Microsoft’s Word Translator Tip turned on. I Mouse Over a word and up comes a dictionary’s worth of content about the word. (My guess is that it’s easily 10x faster than using a paperback dictionary.

Another idea you might find useful would be to press a letter key and have 50 or so common words appear on the screen and then Mouse Click a suitable word. It would be somewhat limited but if the main concern is speed, the trade-off might be worth it.

One final thought is the device that courtroom stenographers use. Beats me how it works, but they can keep up with some mighty fast talkers.

Anyway, you’ve probably already thought of these ideas yourself, but in case one slipped past you, I hope it is useful to you.

Dear Roger, I've thought about you so much and your efforts at finding a voice. Until then, I think it would be wonderful for you to take your old TV reviews of the 300 greatest movies and develop a new TV program. You already have a huge audience. So many of our friends feel the same way we do - "they just don't make them like they used to!" and we would appreciate your seasoned comments.

The augmentative speech devices I've tried were Easy Keys and the Lightwriter. The Easy Keys was much too heavy and I'm still waiting for enlightenment on programming the other one. I don't think I'll be satisfied, though. Fortunately, my husband and a lot of our friends have gotten used to reading my lips. I can even play bridge with a large group of people who have adapted to my limitations.

Thank you for your comments about my website. I do love watercolors but now I'm doing portraits and painting memories of our travels through the Southwest US, and they seem to be better in oils. I have updated it since you viewed it. I've added five paintings and some undersea photos of Laguna Beach that our grandson took in March. I am currently also developing an email newsletter for my website.

My best friend, Sandy, who first sent me your 'blog, is from Chicago. She loves you and took a class from you years ago. She said you are wonderful and still depends on your reviews.

Love, Pat

I've been playing around with audio technology since the late 80s and I recall there were several programs back then that could simulate any voice... PROVIDED... you fed it the proper phonemes.

In the English language there are only 42 sound phonemes (Douglas Adams would be proud), so assuming you can get recordings of all 42 of those sounds it should be possible to reconstruct any voice.

There's a list of them here:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/spellings.html

Or do you think that GPS companies go out of their way to record every street name in America? ;^) I mean, I was playing around with Ronald Reagan recordings 20 years ago, I'd think the technology would have to have advanced since then.

Ebert: That's what I believe the company in Scotland is using.

Apple's Mac OS X speech engine already includes the ability to embed speech modification commands directly in text to fine-tune how the speech engine "speaks" the text. Full details of the syntax for fine-tuning commands are available at:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/FineTuning/FineTuning.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004365-CH5-SW10

Cheers,
Mark

Good luck finding your voice, Roger!

I just thought i'd say, you reviews are very interesting to read, as is your blog. You may not be able to speak, but you can still write very well.

In the words of Stevie Wonder:

"Just because a man is blind doesn't mean he doesn't have vision."

I have always enjoyed your words.. written or spoken. You have been an inspiration to me in my life.

I don't know you, but this makes me indescribably happy. Oh, how I pray that this comes true for you, Mr. Ebert.

FWIW, I hear you voice very clearly in my head every time I read one of your pieces.

It's amazing how much language affects how smart people think we are. I've never been thought dumber than when I worked with a bunch of people who all spoke another language than I do. And I have to admit I never imagined any of them to be brilliant... although who knows, I have no evidence besides the fact that they made no sense to me that says they aren't!

Mr. Ebert, are you at all familiar with Robert Rummel-Hudson and his book Schuyler's Monster? I've followed his website and then his blog for many years as he talks about his daughter Schuyler and how they acquired for her the Big Box of Words that would allow her to speak.
http://www.schuylersmonster.com/big_box_of_words.html

Roger,

Did you happen to see this amazing story on 60 minutes? It's about the incredible potential of stem cell research.

Growing Body Parts
Morley Safer Reports On The Amazing Science Of Regenerative Medicine Growing Body Parts.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/11/60minutes/main5968057.shtml?tag=currentVideoInfo;segmentUtilities

When doctors at the University of Pittsburgh were treating a patient with cancer of the esophagus who was too weak to face complicated surgery, they turned to Dr. Badylak and his ECM.

"Our therapy of choice right now is to remove the esophagus and pull the remaining stomach up through the chest and attach it to what's left in the throat," Badylak explained. "So, the treatment's as bad as the disease. So, what we have done is said, 'Can we take a regenerative medicine approach to allow surgeons and go in and just resect the cancer? And instruct the remaining esophagus to regrow itself as opposed to respond to injury and form a scar?'"

Dr. Blair Jobe operated on 76-year-old Erwin Schmidt last April.

Jobe removed the cancerous lining of the esophagus and inserted a sleeve of ECM. Instead of forming a scar that would block his esophagus, doctors believe the ECM instructed his cells to regrow a new lining.

Today Schmidt is cancer free. "I'm eating real good, I feel terrific, and I'm starting to put weight on. No pain, no nothing," Schmidt told Dr. Jobe.

"So essentially you gave him a new esophagus," Safer remarked.

"We're very excited by this. And I think, you know, in my heart I feel that this will change the way we do things ultimately," Jobe said. "But I think right now it's too early to claim victory."

Perhaps it has been suggested in an earlier comment, but instead of paying for an off the shelf solution, why not sponsor a contest to develop a system with the parameters you desire. The solution could then be released as open source so that it may be expanded and used by others in similar straits.

The late Dennis Klatt, a speech scientist at MIT who developed the KlattTalk system that was sold to Digital Equipment Corporation and marketed as DECTalk, lost his primary voice to larynx cancer and could only whisper for his last years. He had a patch for his text-to-speech device that sounded quite similar to his pre-cancer speaking voice, and colleagues would sometimes be unnerved to hear a robotic version of his voice coming out of his office when he would use the box and that patch to read back something he was writing.

Here's a collection by Klatt of the sounds of various speech synthesizers up to 1987. While computational availability has made the technology more widely available on all kinds of compute platforms, even phones, the quality still lacks much. And to take someone's voice and generate a decent sounding patch that sounds like them shouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

Ebert: A fascinating demonstration. Cereproc in Edinburgh is currently working on a voice for me, and even their first beta was amazing.

Off topic: My first desktop was a DEC Rainbow.

Dear Mr. Ebert, My name is Mich Verrier. I like your self use a synthedic speech engion but not because I can't talk. I am blind and use the Eliquence speech enjon in the Jaws for windows screen reader. I hope as you do that you could get a voice that sounds like yours. just as long as you don't get a voice like stephen hawking I think you will be fine lol. I hope you get well soon and that you find your voice soon. Take care. from Mich Verrier from New LIskeard Ontario Canada.

Ebert: I looked up Eloquence and am impressed.

Do you have a choice of voices? I like some of the Cepstral voices.

Keep coming back!

I remember studying this research some years ago:

"GloveTalkII is a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface. Hand gestures are mapped continuously to ten control parpameters of a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The mapping allows the hand to act as an artificial vocal tract that produces speech in real time. This gives an unlimited vocabulary in addition to direct control of fundamental frequency and volume. Currently, the best version of Glove-TalkII uses several input devices (including a Cyberglove, a ContactGlove, a three space tracker, and a foot pedal), a parallel formant speech synthesizer, and three neural networks. One subject has trained to speak intelligibly with Glove-TalkII. He speaks slowly but with far more natural sounding pitch variations than a text-to-speech syntesizer."

http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/research/glovetalk2/

There's a Youtube video of it here and more videos on the main site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb7K2IpZn6E

I think the best video is the one called "Unrehearsed conversation." on the university web page. This shows the potential as well as the flaws of the system.

This research was originally done in 1994 it seems. The latest version of it seems to be called GRASSP:

http://www.magic.ubc.ca/wiki/pmwiki.php/Projects/GRASSP

I also found this called DIVA:

http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/11_2/pritchard_fels_mobile.html

They seem to be focused more on performance art. But it seems like it could be a more natural way to speak than typing.

There's an open-source text-to-speech application called "Festival" that has been around for quite a while in the Linux world. I believe it now supports OS X, and that one can make their own voices for it. I don't know how difficult it is to create voices, but it looks like at least one company has made an application designed to make the voice-creation process easier:

Festival links:
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
http://festvox.org/

TTS Builder (a commercial application to help make voices for Festival)
http://www.research-lab.com/ttsbuilder/help.htm

Likely a question that you have fielded elsewhere, is tracheal esophageal puncture not an option for you? I have a number of patients that voice quite well with a TEP in place. Best wishes to you and your family

Ahhh Roger,
I just wanted to say that you have been my favorite movie critic. Maybe it's because I agree with you most of the time, even more so than with Gene Siskel (may he rest in peace). I miss your t.v. show but
I am glad to learn that you have written such great works and you share your personal story on your blog. Is there a movie in development about you? I hope there is. I think your journey and your strength and ingenuity are awesome! I wish you and yours all the best, always.
Irma Barrios

I too use synthesized speech because I am totally blind. Like you, I use Cepstral because I like them and, over the last 5 or so years, I have gotten to know them well. I have Cepstral Amy as my default voice, and she is with me 24-7. Unlike most of my fellow blind persons I like concatenative speech better than formant speech. I have just discovered Cereproc, and I am trying to make up my mind as to whether I want Heather, or Catherine. Cereproc now markets to the US. and the voices cost $38 for windows, and $44 for Mac. Come to think of it, since Amy has been with me for about 5 years now, she might get jealous.

Ebert: Lawrence hasn't been speaking to me since I left him for Alex.

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