UK woman regains voice after 25 years thanks to AI

A UK woman who lost her voice to Motor Neurone Disease (MND) has had it restored with the help of artificial intelligence, using just eight seconds of old audio.

Sarah Ezekiel, 59, was diagnosed with MND at age 34, and for 25 years, her children only knew her voice through a synthetic, robotic machine.

“When I first heard it again, I felt like crying. It’s a kind of miracle,” Ezekiel told the BBC. The astonishing breakthrough was made possible by Bristol-based company Smartbox, which used cutting-edge AI from ElevenLabs to reconstruct her voice.

The project faced a major challenge, as the only available audio was a scratchy, eight-second clip from an old VHS tape shot in the 1990s. The footage was wobbly, a blaring TV distorted the sound, and her voice was barely audible. Simon Poole from Smartbox admitted his heart sank when he received the tape, thinking, “there’s no way we’re going to be able to create a voice using audio that bad.”

However, using a “Voice Isolator” and a sophisticated AI that can fill in gaps in a voice, a recognizable replica of Ezekiel’s younger self was created. Her now-adult children, Aviva and Eric, had no memory of her real voice but were deeply moved by the result. “It was amazing,” said Aviva. “Hearing it now in everyday life, it still surprises me.” Eric added that the new voice has made the family closer, allowing them to feel “who she is as a person.”

The technology, which Ezekiel controls using eye-gaze technology, has restored not just her voice but her sense of identity. “I’m glad to be back. It’s better than being a robot,” she said.