AI helps woman rediscover lost voice after 25 years

A UK woman who lost her ability to speak more than two decades ago due to motor neurone disease (MND) is once again able to communicate in her own voice, thanks to artificial intelligence.

Sarah Ezekiel, an artist from north London, was diagnosed with MND at the age of 34 while pregnant with her second child. The condition gradually weakens the nervous system, affecting muscles in the tongue, throat and mouth, and often results in complete loss of speech.

Following her diagnosis, Ezekiel relied on voice-generating software and a computer to communicate, though the artificial voice sounded nothing like her own. Despite these challenges, she continued her work as an artist, using computer technology to create her pieces.

Her children, Aviva and Eric, grew up never hearing their mother’s natural voice. Until recently, recreating an original voice required long, high-quality recordings, and the results were often described as flat or robotic, according to Simon Poole of Smartbox, a UK-based assistive communication company.

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Poole said his team initially requested an hour-long voice recording to replicate Ezekiel’s speech. But like many people diagnosed before smartphones became common, she had little audio preserved. The only material she could provide was an eight-second clip from a 1990s home video muffled and overlaid with background television noise.

“When I first heard the clip, my heart sank,” Poole said.

To tackle the challenge, Smartbox partnered with New York-based AI specialists ElevenLabs, whose technology can recreate human-like voices even from minimal recordings.

Using one tool to isolate the audio and another to fill in missing sound patterns, Poole and his team were able to generate a voice nearly identical to Ezekiel’s own, complete with her London accent and slight lisp.

“She wrote to me saying she nearly cried when she heard it,” Poole said. “She even played it to a friend who knew her before she lost her speech, and they agreed it was like having her voice back.”