Since I was a kid, I’ve been reading Roger Ebert’s reviews–in fact, his reviews were my first real encounter with magazine style writing, and I credit him as one of my early influences.Ebert left the show “At the Movies,” which he once shared with Gene Siskel, in 2006, after thyroid cancer took away his ability to speak. He has continued to write reviews, and while he has used a text to speech computer program to communicate with others, his show just isn’t the same without him.
However, next week, on January 21st, Roger Ebert, will return to his show which will be retitled Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies. One of the reasons for his return is that he can now use his own voice to speak again.
The program he uses that converts his typed text to speech draws from a large cache of Ebert’s words that have been gleaned from Ebert’s many years as a media presence. CereProc, a Scottish company that creates synthesized speech, has created the voice. 
CBS news reported that Roger was able to speak in his own voice to his wife Chaz for the first time in years. She said that she hadn’t fully realized how much she missed hearing his actual voice.
While Ebert has said that the synthetic speech doesn’t allow for certain emotions–he quipped that it’s impossible to tell a joke on a computer because you can’t control certain aspects of tone–this particular speech technology has certainly given him a better, more personal option, and for that he’s certainly glad.
I can only hope that as speech technology improves, especially in the area of speech, there will be more advances in synthetic speech, but either way, Roger, it’s good to have you back.
We need more examples like this to show the benefit of actual speech technology.