West Michigan woman serves as test subject for voice recreation
Source: www.wwmt.com Author: staff For Steve and Annet Shannon it's a chance to maintain normalcy, and regain a voice that could be lost. Five years ago Annet Shannon was diagnosed with a rare form of tongue cancer, and doctors removed 30% of the back of her tongue followed by a series of radiation treatments, which Steve Shannon says were working, "Everything was going well with no evidence of recurrence until this last December where she found a lump on her neck. To make a long story short she will be having surgery May 4, 2010. There is a possibility she could be losing her tongue and voice box and her ability to speak." For the Shannons it's a grim reality that Annet's surgery could take her voice, but the couple had at least heard of famed film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his jaw to cancer surgery, but was given a new custom text to voice device where he was able to communicate using his own voice. To Steve Shannon, that seemed like just the thing for them, "My wife was very interested in this technology and she was searching to learn more. By fate we met Professor John Eulenberg, director of MSU's Artificial Language Lab. The Artificial Language Lab has begun a project as one of five sites to help people to create their own personal text-to-speech software systems." The Shannons learned that the underlying technology was created by Tim Bunnell and his team at the University of Delaware [...]