On Roger Ebert, and taking a moment to be thankful

I've been a little bitter lately. I turn on the news and see the Great Recession, natural disasters, war, and government deadlock. It's not a great moment for America, or for Western Civilization in general. Indeed, sometimes it's easy to think that America and the West are well past their prime and have been declining for a while.

Then I see something like this on Boing Boing: "Roger Ebert gets his voice back: 'Uncanny. A good feeling.'"

Film critic Roger Ebert has been unable to speak audibly for four years, since he received drastic surgery to treat his cancer. He's been quite articulate though, at RogerEbert.com, on his blog, Roger Ebert's Journal and on Twitter at @EBERTCHICAGO. He passes handwritten notes, and gestures with his hands.

And now he can speak with his own voice -- kind of. He uses a text-to-speech program on a laptop computer. A recent profile in Esquire Magazine, explains:

The voice is called Alex, a voice with a generic American accent and a generic tone and no emotion. At first Ebert spoke with a voice called Lawrence, which had an English accent. Ebert liked sounding English, because he is an Anglophile, and his English voice reminded him of those beautiful early summers when he would stop in London with [his wife,] Chaz on their way home after the annual chaos of Cannes. But the voice can be hard to decipher even without an English accent layered on top of it — it is given to eccentric pronunciations, especially of names and places — and so for the time being, Ebert has settled for generic instead.


Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen Hawking. They have catalog voices — Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue — with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does. There might be moments, when he calls for Chaz from another room or tells her that he loves her and says goodnight — he's a night owl; she prefers mornings — when they both might be able to close their eyes and pretend that everything is as it was.

It's an inspiring profile, by the way. Read the whole thing: "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man":

Now, the new software has arrived, and Oprah has the story:

To be honest, the voice doesn't sound much at all like the old Ebert to me -- but it obviously does to Ebert and his wife, and that's the important thing. And it sounds more like Ebert than "Alex" does.

Many people have real and tragic problems today. But most of us don't, and those of us with the blessings of health, food, shelter, and rewarding work should take some time every now and then and be grateful. And we should also be grateful for the miraculous tools we have at our disposal, the iPhones and Web browsers and text-to-speech synthesizers that have given a great man back his voice.