Starling.

A friend’s mom lost her ability to speak because of ALS. My friend missed hearing her voice and knew how hard it was for her mom. I’d been experimenting with voice cloning, so I used a voicemail her mom had left when she could still speak to make a few samples. When I shared them with my friend, I saw the potential and set out to build Starling.

I developed Starling as a proof of concept for personal voice banking and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). It explores recording and reviewing a voice sample, trying generated speech, and building a sentence by selecting words. I also explored eye tracking as another way to make selections. The communication sandbox uses the browser’s speech voice.