[Not LV] VocaliD: Human Voicebank Initiative

[kayray]

Thanks, for the post, David! I'm excited about volunteering and maybe helping to give someone a voice. :)

[English Andrew]

I've volunteered for this as have my wife and 7 year old daughter. I take the points that a) we would prefer it to be a non-commercial organisation and b) accepting that it is commercial, we would like some of the profits ourselves. Nonetheless, a friend of ours has a 6 year old daughter who uses a voice-generating device and it is important to A's sense of identity to have her own voice rather than an adult one or the same voice as all the other girls in her class. I am therefore glad to help out. We record short sentences taken from a variety of sources - practical phrases, The Call of the Wild, The Velveteen Rabbit, Kipling, Little Women etc. and a "periodic table" of speech sounds becomes more and more colourful as more sentences are added - so it is an enjoyable thing to do. Some of the phrases for child recorders could be a bit simpler but we take it gradually.

And no, I can't see the point of the height (or weight) questions either but I just left them blank.