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--></style></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>I wish we could get ahold of that software for us to play with on our own pcs. Its too bad someone does not start a project to save keynote gold, and infovox230. </p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Sent from <a href="https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986">Mail</a> for Windows 10</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div style='mso-element:para-border-div;border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal style='border:none;padding:0in'><b>From: </b><a href="mailto:jaybird@bluegrasspals.com">Jayson Smith</a><br><b>Sent: </b>Sunday, March 18, 2018 18:04<br><b>To: </b><a href="mailto:dectalk@bluegrasspals.com">DECtalk Discussions</a><br><b>Subject: </b>[DECtalk] The Quest to Save Stephen Hawking's Voice</p></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Here's an interesting article I thought some of you might like.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Jayson</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>--------------------</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The quest to save Stephen Hawking's voice</p><p class=MsoNormal>How a Silicon Valley team helped rebuild his distinctive robotic sound</p><p class=MsoNormal>By Jason Fagone</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Eric Dorsey, a 62-year-old engineer in Palo Alto, was watching TV </p><p class=MsoNormal>Tuesday night when he started getting texts that Stephen Hawking had </p><p class=MsoNormal>died. He turned on the news and saw clips of the famed physicist </p><p class=MsoNormal>speaking in his iconic android voice — the voice that Dorsey had spent </p><p class=MsoNormal>so much time as a young man helping to create, and then, much later, to </p><p class=MsoNormal>save from destruction.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Dorsey and Hawking had first met nearly 30 years earlier to the day. In </p><p class=MsoNormal>March 1988, Hawking was visiting UC Berkeley during a three-week lecture </p><p class=MsoNormal>tour.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At 46, Hawking was already famous for his discoveries about quantum </p><p class=MsoNormal>physics and black holes, but not as famous as he was about to be. His </p><p class=MsoNormal>best-seller, “A Brief History of Time,” was a week away from release, </p><p class=MsoNormal>and Californians were curious about this British professor from the </p><p class=MsoNormal>University of Cambridge, packing the seats of his public talks, </p><p class=MsoNormal>approaching him at meals. Hawking motored into buildings and onto stages </p><p class=MsoNormal>in a wheelchair with a seat of maroon sheepskin, zooming around with the </p><p class=MsoNormal>nudge of a joystick, grinning as he left journalists and his nurses in </p><p class=MsoNormal>the dust.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>When he spoke, it was in the voice of a robot, a voice that emerged from </p><p class=MsoNormal>a gray box fixed to the back of his chair. The voice synthesizer, a </p><p class=MsoNormal>commercial product known as the CallText 5010, was a novelty then, not </p><p class=MsoNormal>yet a part of his identity; he’d begun using it just three years before, </p><p class=MsoNormal>after the motor neuron disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis stole his </p><p class=MsoNormal>ability to speak. Hawking selected bits of text on a video screen by </p><p class=MsoNormal>moving his cheek, and the CallText turned the text into speech. At the </p><p class=MsoNormal>start of one lecture, Hawking joked about it: “The only problem,” he </p><p class=MsoNormal>said, to big laughs, “is that it gives me an American accent.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Dorsey was with Hawking for part of that trip, tagging along as a sort </p><p class=MsoNormal>of authority on the voice, explaining its workings to journalists. He </p><p class=MsoNormal>worked at the Mountain View company that manufactured the CallText 5010, </p><p class=MsoNormal>a hardware board with two computer chips running custom software.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>An upbeat 32-year-old, Dorsey was quiet by nature, but driven. He had </p><p class=MsoNormal>joined Speech Plus as an intern, attracted by its mission to help the </p><p class=MsoNormal>voiceless and the disabled; now he led a team of engineers, and at least </p><p class=MsoNormal>20,000 lines of his own code were in the CallText, the product that gave </p><p class=MsoNormal>voice to the most celebrated scientist of his era.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“We are getting close to answering the age-old questions,” Hawking said </p><p class=MsoNormal>at the close of a lecture. “Why are we here? Where did we come from? </p><p class=MsoNormal>Thank you for listening to me.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At the end of his California tour, the physicist gave Dorsey a signed </p><p class=MsoNormal>copy of his new book, his thumbprint pressed onto the inside cover.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Hawking returned to Cambridge, Dorsey to his life in California.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Twenty-six years went by before they would cross paths again.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>In tech years, that is a millennium. The Internet happened. Silicon </p><p class=MsoNormal>Valley boomed, busted, boomed again. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Uber.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Dorsey, meanwhile, left Speech Plus, which went bankrupt and was sold to </p><p class=MsoNormal>a series of other companies. He got married and had kids. He joined a </p><p class=MsoNormal>Buddhist temple. He eventually left the field of speech technology </p><p class=MsoNormal>altogether, becoming an engineering leader at DVR maker TiVo.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Tech, he’d learned, moves so fast. “There’s a new iPhone every year,” </p><p class=MsoNormal>Dorsey says. “Everything just kind of gets buried in the dustbin of </p><p class=MsoNormal>history very, very quickly.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>That’s why, when an email from Cambridge University arrived out of the </p><p class=MsoNormal>blue in 2014, Dorsey was surprised. It came from Hawking’s technical </p><p class=MsoNormal>assistant, Jonathan Wood, who was responsible for Hawking’s </p><p class=MsoNormal>communications systems.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Wood explained something so improbable that Dorsey had trouble </p><p class=MsoNormal>understanding at first: Hawking was still using the CallText 5010 speech </p><p class=MsoNormal>synthesizer, a version last upgraded in 1986. In nearly 30 years, he had </p><p class=MsoNormal>never switched to newer technology. Hawking liked the voice just the way </p><p class=MsoNormal>it was, and had stubbornly refused other options. But now the hardware </p><p class=MsoNormal>was showing wear and tear. If it failed entirely, his distinctive voice </p><p class=MsoNormal>would be lost to the ages.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The solution, Wood believed, was to replicate the decaying hardware in </p><p class=MsoNormal>new software, to somehow transplant a 30-year-old voice synthesizer into </p><p class=MsoNormal>a modern laptop — without changing the sound of the voice. For years, he </p><p class=MsoNormal>and several colleagues in Cambridge had been exploring different </p><p class=MsoNormal>approaches. What did Dorsey think?</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Thirty years old? He thought. Oh, my God.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It wouldn’t be easy. They might have to locate the old source code. They </p><p class=MsoNormal>might have to find the original chips and the manuals for those chips. </p><p class=MsoNormal>They couldn’t buy them anymore, the companies don’t exist. Solving the </p><p class=MsoNormal>problem might mean mounting an archaeological dig through an antiquated </p><p class=MsoNormal>era of technology.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>But it was for Stephen Hawking.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“Let’s get it done,” Dorsey said.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The poet Longfellow once wrote that the human voice is “the organ of the </p><p class=MsoNormal>soul.” More than any other part of us, our voice expresses who we are, </p><p class=MsoNormal>and the smallest fluctuations swing meaning in ways that are hard for </p><p class=MsoNormal>computers to understand. You speak a sentence, and the intonation rises </p><p class=MsoNormal>or falls depending on whether you’re making a statement or asking a </p><p class=MsoNormal>question. You do it without thinking, but a computer has to make a guess.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Today’s synthesized voices, like Apple’s Siri, rely on prerecorded </p><p class=MsoNormal>libraries of natural sound. Voice actors record huge libraries of words </p><p class=MsoNormal>and syllables, and software chops them up and reassembles them into </p><p class=MsoNormal>sentences on the fly. But 30 years ago, computers could only produce a </p><p class=MsoNormal>“stick-figure version” of a human voice, says Patti Price, a speech </p><p class=MsoNormal>recognition specialist and linguist in Palo Alto.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Back then, she worked as a postdoc in the Massachusetts Institute of </p><p class=MsoNormal>Technology lab of Dennis Klatt, a tall, thin, opera-loving scientist </p><p class=MsoNormal>originally from Wisconsin. Klatt is the godfather of Hawking’s voice. He </p><p class=MsoNormal>blasted his own throat with X-rays to measure the shape of his voice box </p><p class=MsoNormal>as he articulated certain sounds, and then developed a software model of </p><p class=MsoNormal>speech, the Klatt Model, based on his own voice.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Speech Plus took Klatt’s model, improved on it, and commercialized it in </p><p class=MsoNormal>various products, including the CallText 5010. One of Dorsey’s </p><p class=MsoNormal>contributions was to write an algorithm that controlled the intonation </p><p class=MsoNormal>of the voice, the rise and fall of words and sentences. Speech Plus </p><p class=MsoNormal>would sell thousands of CallText systems, though many customers </p><p class=MsoNormal>complained that the voice sounded too robotic.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>But Hawking liked it.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>True, it was robotic, but he appreciated that it was easy to understand: </p><p class=MsoNormal>“noise-robust,” as Price explains. The shape of its waveform was more </p><p class=MsoNormal>like a series of plateaus than the steep mountain cliffs of human </p><p class=MsoNormal>voices, which fall off more sharply. The flattish slope of Hawking’s </p><p class=MsoNormal>voice made it cut through noise in amphitheaters and lecture halls. He </p><p class=MsoNormal>often began his speeches with the same line — “Can you hear me?” — and </p><p class=MsoNormal>the audience would respond with an enthusiastic “Yes!”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“It’s got a ring to it that sticks out,” Price says.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“It’s very intelligible,” Dorsey says. “You can listen to it for a long </p><p class=MsoNormal>time, and it’s not irritating.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Hawking’s only complaint was that it didn’t have a British accent.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Over the years, as synthetic voices grew more natural, taking advantage </p><p class=MsoNormal>of faster chips and cheap storage, Hawking had chances to upgrade. In </p><p class=MsoNormal>1996, a Massachusetts speech technology company called Nuance, which had </p><p class=MsoNormal>acquired the remains of Speech Plus, upgraded the CallText with evolved </p><p class=MsoNormal>software code that made the voice sound fuller and faster, less robotic, </p><p class=MsoNormal>with shorter pauses between sentences — to the engineers, an obvious </p><p class=MsoNormal>improvement.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>They sent Hawking a sample of the new voice, thinking he’d be pleased. </p><p class=MsoNormal>He was not. He said the intonation wasn’t right. He preferred the 1986 </p><p class=MsoNormal>voice, the one modulated by Dorsey’s intonation algorithm. Hawking would </p><p class=MsoNormal>stick with that one.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better,” he once </p><p class=MsoNormal>said, “and because I have identified with it.” He could change to a </p><p class=MsoNormal>smoother voice, but then he wouldn’t sound like himself.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“To Stephen, his equipment is like a part of his body,” said Wood, his </p><p class=MsoNormal>chief technical aide. “To upgrade him to a new piece of software or a </p><p class=MsoNormal>new piece of hardware … he’s having to change a physical part of himself.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Starting around 2009, Wood and several others at Cambridge began trying </p><p class=MsoNormal>to separate Hawking’s voice from the failing CallText hardware. The </p><p class=MsoNormal>group would included Peter Benie, a computer guru at the university; </p><p class=MsoNormal>Pawel Wozniak, a local engineering student; and Mark Green, an </p><p class=MsoNormal>experienced electrical engineer with Intel, which had a long </p><p class=MsoNormal>relationship with Hawking.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>One option they considered was tweaking a modern synthetic voice like </p><p class=MsoNormal>Siri to sound more like Hawking. But Siri-type systems rely on the vast </p><p class=MsoNormal>computer power of Internet clouds, and Hawking couldn’t be constantly </p><p class=MsoNormal>tethered to the Internet. Benie also tried a completely different </p><p class=MsoNormal>approach. He wrote a software emulator for the CallText — essentially a </p><p class=MsoNormal>program that would fool a modern PC into thinking it was actually the </p><p class=MsoNormal>old CallText. But the samples it produced didn’t sound faithful enough </p><p class=MsoNormal>for Hawking’s taste.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>By the time Cambridge reached out to Dorsey in 2014, they were </p><p class=MsoNormal>investigating a third avenue: track down the old CallText source code, </p><p class=MsoNormal>now owned by Nuance, and port it to Hawking’s laptop, transplanting the </p><p class=MsoNormal>old voice into a fresh new body.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Was it possible? Dorsey had no idea. It depended on whether he could </p><p class=MsoNormal>find the source code, or, failing that, information that would let him </p><p class=MsoNormal>reverse-engineer the source code.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>He started emailing colleagues he hadn’t seen in 30 years, asking if </p><p class=MsoNormal>they had any CallText bric-a-brac still laying around: boards, chips, </p><p class=MsoNormal>manuals. One guy found an actual CallText board in his garage. Others </p><p class=MsoNormal>located dusty schematics.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It had the feel of a mad scramble through an earlier era of technology. </p><p class=MsoNormal>But people everywhere leaped at the chance to help. “The goal is to save </p><p class=MsoNormal>his voice,” Dorsey said. “Once you go to somebody — ‘I need you to help </p><p class=MsoNormal>save Stephen Hawking’s voice’ — they immediately wake up.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>His closest collaborator in Palo Alto soon became Price, the speech </p><p class=MsoNormal>technologist who had once studied with Klatt, the godfather of Hawking’s </p><p class=MsoNormal>voice. She was a master at analyzing audio samples, comparing one to </p><p class=MsoNormal>another and using their audio fingerprints to reverse engineer how they </p><p class=MsoNormal>must have been created.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Dorsey’s archaeological quest for old code turned out to be a </p><p class=MsoNormal>frustrating one. No one at Nuance was able to find the source code from </p><p class=MsoNormal>the 1986 version of CallText. They did, however, find the code for the </p><p class=MsoNormal>upgraded 1996 version of the voice, on a backup tape in an office in </p><p class=MsoNormal>Belgium. After a few months of work, Nuance engineers got the code up </p><p class=MsoNormal>and running and sent a series of audio samples to Hawking’s team, </p><p class=MsoNormal>adjusting the program to try to match the 1986 voice.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It didn’t quite work. For one thing, the match was close but not </p><p class=MsoNormal>perfect. Hawking flagged subtle differences others had trouble </p><p class=MsoNormal>discerning. “It’s like recognizing your mother’s voice,” Price said. </p><p class=MsoNormal>“When you hear them over the phone, they say two syllables and you know </p><p class=MsoNormal>if that’s right or not.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The other issue was that Nuance owned the code, not Hawking. The famed </p><p class=MsoNormal>physicist had always been intent on controlling the use of his own </p><p class=MsoNormal>voice. If the team avoided using proprietary software, Hawking was </p><p class=MsoNormal>likely to have more control.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At this point, they switched tacks and returned to one of their original </p><p class=MsoNormal>ideas: to emulate the CallText in software, similar to how PCs can </p><p class=MsoNormal>emulate old Nintendo games that aren’t sold anymore.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The CallText, of course, was a more intricate beast than a Nintendo, </p><p class=MsoNormal>driven by two obsolete and complexly interacting chips, one made by </p><p class=MsoNormal>Intel and the other by NEC. Building the emulator demanded heroic feats </p><p class=MsoNormal>of programming, intuition and high-tech surgery. The chips had to be </p><p class=MsoNormal>removed from a spare CallText board with tweezers and a screwdriver. An </p><p class=MsoNormal>emulator for the Intel chip had to be written from scratch, by Benie. A </p><p class=MsoNormal>separate emulator, for the NEC, was borrowed from an open-source </p><p class=MsoNormal>Nintendo emulator called Higan.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Then all these disparate pieces had to be glued together. It was a </p><p class=MsoNormal>little like doing a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room. One chip was passing a </p><p class=MsoNormal>mysterious packet to the other every 10 milliseconds. Why? What was in it?</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>For a while, it was tough going. Some of the audio samples were so poor </p><p class=MsoNormal>that no one dared play them for Hawking.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The breakthrough came just before Christmas 2017, when the emulator </p><p class=MsoNormal>finally started producing sounds that resembled the familiar voice they </p><p class=MsoNormal>had been chasing. It had some minor glitches, but according to Price, </p><p class=MsoNormal>the voice was an acoustical match to Hawking’s, the waveforms virtually </p><p class=MsoNormal>identical. The only perceptible difference was a lack of analog buzz. </p><p class=MsoNormal>“It’s like a clean and shiny scrubbed-up version of his voice,” Price says.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>When Benie heard it for the first time, coming out of a computer instead </p><p class=MsoNormal>of Hawking’s voice box, he thought it sounded more American than </p><p class=MsoNormal>Hawking’s voice. It was just an aural illusion. Benie realized that </p><p class=MsoNormal>perhaps, whenever he saw Hawking speak, he had been mentally adding a </p><p class=MsoNormal>hint of Britishness.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Over the next weeks, in Cambridge and Palo Alto, the team members </p><p class=MsoNormal>continued to debug the new voice, feeding it snippets of old Hawking </p><p class=MsoNormal>speeches and sample texts full of random commas, listening to the results.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>On Jan. 17, the team felt ready to demonstrate the new voice for </p><p class=MsoNormal>Hawking. Wood, Wozniak, and Benie went to Hawking’s home in Cambridge </p><p class=MsoNormal>and played him samples on a Linux laptop. To the team’s relief and </p><p class=MsoNormal>happiness, Hawking gave his blessing. It did sound like his voice.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>They still needed to port the voice to the PC, so temporarily, Wood </p><p class=MsoNormal>loaded a version of the voice onto a miniature hardware board known as a </p><p class=MsoNormal>Raspberry Pi. He thought Hawking might want to evaluate the voice in </p><p class=MsoNormal>everyday life, and the Pi was the quickest way to get him up and running.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>On Jan. 26, Wood took the Pi along to Hawking’s house and asked if he’d </p><p class=MsoNormal>like to try it out. Hawking raised his eyebrows, which meant “yes.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The team put the Pi in a tiny black box, attached it to Hawking’s chair </p><p class=MsoNormal>with Velcro, and plugged it into the voice box. Then they disconnected </p><p class=MsoNormal>the CallText. For the first time in 33 years, Hawking was able to speak </p><p class=MsoNormal>without it.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Wood watched eagerly for Hawking’s reaction.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“I love it,” Hawking said.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>For the next few weeks in private conversations, Hawking continued to </p><p class=MsoNormal>speak through the emulator and the Raspberry Pi, chatting happily with </p><p class=MsoNormal>friends and colleagues. Wood said, “It was a pleasure to be able to give </p><p class=MsoNormal>him something like that, that so many people have worked on for so many </p><p class=MsoNormal>years.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>All that remained, the final step in the project, was to get the PC </p><p class=MsoNormal>version, still a bit buggy, working smoothly. But after a few more code </p><p class=MsoNormal>revisions, it was finally bug-free.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“We had pretty much completed all the technical hurdles,” Dorsey said. </p><p class=MsoNormal>“Everybody felt, finally, this is it, it’s going to work, this is done.”</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>And that is when Hawking got sick, in February.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>According to Wood, Hawking continued using the emulator until his final </p><p class=MsoNormal>days. He was able to talk with his loved ones and caregivers with the </p><p class=MsoNormal>new software on the Raspberry Pi. The last words he spoke while wired </p><p class=MsoNormal>into his chair, whatever they were, he spoke with a version of his voice </p><p class=MsoNormal>that lives only in code, potentially deathless bits and bytes.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Everyone on the project understood that Hawking might not live long </p><p class=MsoNormal>enough to get much use out of the emulator. He had been sick before, but </p><p class=MsoNormal>always recovered. In 2014, when Wood first contacted Dorsey, Hawking was </p><p class=MsoNormal>72. They decided, though, that his CallText boards could keel over in </p><p class=MsoNormal>six months, while Hawking might live to 80.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Along with sadness at Hawking’s death, Dorsey can’t help feeling some </p><p class=MsoNormal>disappointment. He and the team had raced for years to build a </p><p class=MsoNormal>complicated thing that had worked beautifully, but now sat idle.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>At the same time, the project brought him back to his younger self, the </p><p class=MsoNormal>guy who wanted to use engineering to perform good deeds and help people. </p><p class=MsoNormal>All those years ago, working on the intonation algorithm in the </p><p class=MsoNormal>CallText, he couldn’t imagine that it would end up helping define a </p><p class=MsoNormal>genius of science to the world, and even to himself.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Tech changes fast. Most machines end up as dust, and when we die, our </p><p class=MsoNormal>voices die with us. Hawking’s voice is different. The original CallText </p><p class=MsoNormal>boards have passed to his estate, to use as his family wishes. So has </p><p class=MsoNormal>the new software, the CallText emulator, which can be ported to future </p><p class=MsoNormal>platforms as they are invented.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Hawking was, famously, an atheist, skeptical of the afterlife; “We have </p><p class=MsoNormal>this one life to appreciate the grand design of this universe,” he once </p><p class=MsoNormal>said, “and for that, I am extremely grateful.” But there is no longer </p><p class=MsoNormal>any physical reason his voice can’t live forever.</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>_______________________________________________</p><p class=MsoNormal>Dectalk mailing list</p><p class=MsoNormal>Dectalk@bluegrasspals.com</p><p class=MsoNormal>http://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk</p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>