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Enrico Hondius

@Hawlucha @nixCraft
This is the original picture with alt-text added. I used Google translate as OCR.

Photo of a bearded man at a desk with a computer and a loudspeaker. This is Dr. Dennis H. Klatt You probably never heard of him He is the American computer scientist who gave Stephen Hawking his artificial voice in the winter of 1987, at least 5 years before it would have been available. Over 300 individual recording clips of Dr. Klatts actual voice are what we heard when Stephen Hawking 'spoke'. Dr. Klatt knew Stephen Hawkings life expectancy was short, so he completed the programming in record time. Stephen Hawking was extremely grateful and sent Dr. Klatt a personal letter of thanks and an invitation to visit him. It was not meant to be. Dr. Klatt died of cancer less than a year later. He had worked on the voice program while undergoing chemotherapy, and (ironically) even after the cancer had taken his own voice. Over the years, every time Professor Hawkings voice technology was upgraded, he was offered 'better', more natural sounding voices, even one that was customized to sound like his original voice, British accent included. He always refused, saying "Thank you, no, my late friend Dennis' voice IS my voice".
14 Dec 2022 at 16:52 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
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