Hillbilly 2.0

originally posted: 04/15/02

Brought to you by Sarah Mason, Stephen Hawking, and other really smart people.

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative motor neuron disease that has left him unable to speak on his own. However, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, he can choose the words he wants on a portable computer and either have his voice synthesis unit speak them immediately or save them to disk for later recitation. He calls his synthesizer "by far the best I have heard, because it varies the intonation and doesn't speak like a Dalek." (I think by Dalek he's referring to a type of robot from the Dr. Who TV series. Hawking is an avid science fiction fan who has even made a guest appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that episode, Commander Data [a sophisticated robot himself] had created holographic images of history's great physicists with whom to play poker. Hawking, playing himself, teased Albert Einstein about the latter's notorious lack of facility with math. . . . See, that sci-fi nerd trivia in my head comes in handy from time to time!) Anyway, Hawking's only complaint about his voice unit is that it gives him an American accent, while he is decidedly British.

I was talking the other night with Sarah about computers and voice modules. At work, she had been helping to "train" a word-recognition program that would read text aloud for vision-impaired computer users. However, the program balked at her accent, which is British, and would not cooperate until she spoke with a proper American twang. This was how the subject of computers with accents actually came up.

So we got to speculating . . . Shouldn't you be able to install the voice-synthesizer accent software of your choice? Then the synthesized voice would be more truly your own. Hawking could install the BBC package — or, depending on his mood or his audience, download Cockney Rhyming Slang, Rasta Jah Mon, Youse Gotta Problem Wit Dat 3.5 or Hillbilly 2.0. He'd have to have constantly streaming upgrades to keep the Youthfully Hip program current, but I'm sure the technology is available.

Today I'm running Sophisticated Editor 3.3, having temporarily swapped out the Twist My Arm martial arts subroutine I used over the weekend. No glitches so far, but it's still pretty early.