A group of McGill University students wants to give cancer patients their voice back without even having to make a sound.
Their product, Silent Voice, allows users to make a phone call or have a conversation in their own voice.
Co-creator Austin Wang showed CTV News how to use the product. While wearing multiple sensors on his face all he has to do is mouth the words while sitting in front of a computer. The sensors on his face and webcam can detect what he’s trying to say.
“The electrodes are able to detect that there are different muscle signals, so they’re able to differentiate between the very similar letters of words,” said Wang.
The voice plays back in real time. It’s a clone of the user’s voice, sampling from something as short as a 30-second video of them talking in the past.
“We don’t need an extensive library of past voicemails of these patients or something like that,” said Wang.
Four third year students at McGill University are behind Silent Voice. The friends created it for cancer patients who have had their voice box removed and can no longer speak.
They were inspired by Neuralink, a company giving people with ALS their voices back through surgery.
“Without having to go through surgery, how far could we potentially go in terms of returning a voice to someone that’s lost it?” said co-creator Frank Guo.
They built the entire system in just 36 hours at Cal Hacks. The world’s largest collegiate hackathon, hosted at UC Berkeley. The group of friends entered to challenge themselves in their free time and ended up placing second overall, beating out Ivy league competitors.
“You know, each electrode costs like $20 each. So, our goal is to make everything very affordable. But we also want to make things very accessible, too,” said Wang.
“We’re thinking that past the hackathon we can potentially keep the accuracy even without the electrodes. You know, as simple as using a camera on the phone,” said Guo.
The students say they hope to secure funding to develop the product even further, maybe even turning it into an app so that more people can hear their loved one’s voices again.
