She lost her voice to cancer. She brought it back using AI

WBUR podcast, Boston. I'm Lisa Mullins in Boston. Artificial intelligence has given Alice Hardy a voice. Hardy is a vibrant 39-year-old who had surgery for thyroid cancer last year. She had to have her voice box removed. But she was prepared for the outcome. Days before the surgery, Hardy used a technology at Boston Children's Hospital that clones patients' voices before they lose the ability to speak. It's mostly aimed at patients with ALS. But when Hardy met the director of the program, John Costello, she signed on. We invited them both to our studio. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you. That is Alice Hardy's voice. It's her cloned voice. When I asked her a question, she typed out the answer on her smartphone, and then she played it back on a Bluetooth speaker. It takes a little bit of time, so we condense the part where she typed out her answers. John Costello explained the AI technology Hardy uses. So somebody comes into our clinic because they're at risk of or they have lost their ability to speak. And with as little as 30 seconds to 60 seconds of quality recording, we're able to use... currently available artificial intelligence processes to create a voice that in many instances sounds nearly indistinguishable from someone's natural speech. Okay, Alice, I wonder what it was like to make the decision to clone your voice. If you had any particular fears, any concerns, and you're typing in the answer right now, which we will hear coming from a little speaker on your caller in just a minute. I'm a pretty curious person by nature and never really questioned not doing it. So you were not hesitant. John, did you feel like you had to bring up anything that Alice may not have thought of? Did you have to kind of guide her through this process? Because she is new to it. You're not. Right. We have learned a tremendous amount from all of our patients. First, there's excitement. And then as people settle into it, they start to think about, well, but how is it controlled? And what happens if someone else has access to my voice clone? What happens if I am no longer here? And we've put together some guiding principles for patients. So in Alice's case, as I recall, I handed you our principles. So you understood what others have indicated are. maybe concerns with privacy or autonomy or control. So Children's Hospital has come up with a multi-page document outlining ethical concerns. And Alice, did you have those concerns yourself? I did have fears around risks, around lack of control and deep fakes and my privacy. And what kind of answer did you get that made you feel better?

Part of it was that I really wanted to use my own voice after my surgery, and part of it was that John talked to me about having control and ownership over my own voice. And so you own these recordings of your voice? I could read your lips and you said I do. So you can communicate in different ways, including with gestures and with your face. So I was going to ask you if you can express laughter or anger or, you know, attitude, whatever. And it certainly comes through your face, even if it doesn't come through the voice. But John, can it come through the voice? Is that the kind of flexibility the recordings have? So in terms of laughter, other kinds of sounds that one makes with intonation, Those are harder right now, but it is definitely moving in that direction. As an example, there's a lot of focus on helping people be able to use their voice clone to sing and have it sound authentically like them singing, whether they were a good singer or a bad singer. Alice, you're laughing and nodding your head. Are you a singer? Is this something you used to be? Yeah. What kind of music? You miss it. When you first heard your voice as a cloned voice, what did you think? I'm sorry. I can see you tearing up. Maybe that's the answer, I guess. Yeah. Does it sound like your actual voice? There are some moments where it sounds like me and other moments it doesn't, and that's hilarious. It's hilarious because you're saying my words but not my voice. And so I also wonder, and John was mentioning this in terms of the ethical considerations, privacy considerations, you having worried about deep fakes of your voice and how it's going to be used, at the point where, and... You know, we all know that our time on this earth is limited, but in the point where you're not here anymore, what happens to your voice? I haven't made a plan yet and need to think about that. Part of me wants it to die with me. But if there's a way I could give it to someone who wasn't lucky enough to clone their voice in time, I would consider that a useful thing. John, can that happen? Does it happen? It's quite early in the use of voice clones, so that's not something we've encountered. I do want to clarify something about the voice clone. It's not a set of recordings. It's not sitting someplace. Voice clone currently is all cloud-based. It's not something one could readily go and access. Alice, with all that you're going through now, still fighting cancer, where does the ability for you to be able to speak, even without having a voice box, where does that lie in your life? I use this every day all the time in almost every interaction. I depend on it. Do you have any regrets? No regrets.

What's it like to hear that, John? It's wonderful to hear, and it harkens back to when we were sitting in my office and we first... created the voice and the smiles, the laughter, the tears that represented preservation of self, the ability to continue to have that acoustical fingerprint that is the reflection of who we are. And to hear now many, many months later, that still remains something that is key and important, I think is really wonderful to hear. John Costello, director of the Augmentative Communication Program at Boston Children's Hospital, and Alice Hardy, a patient who lost her voice box and speaks with the help of AI technology that cloned her voice. Thank you both for being here. It's a pleasure to be here. You're welcome. After our interview, Alice Hardy said she finally made a decision about what will ultimately happen to her cloned voice. She said when she dies, she'd like her voice to no longer exist.