Rupal Patel

Rupal Patel, founder of VocaliD, describes how she is developing a technology that creates personalized, enhanced voices for the speech impaired.

ABOUT RUPAL

Looking for ways to give voice to the voiceless, Rupal Patel founded VocaliD, a company that creates customized synthetic voices by combining the speaker’s residual voice with an anatomically similar voice selected from a donor database. The result is a reverse engineered voice that approximates how a person may sound if not limited by a speech impairment. Rupal is a Professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory, an interdisciplinary research group she founded that focuses on the study of speech communication in typically developing talkers and individuals with neuromotor speech impairments. Rupal also holds appointments at Harvard, MIT, University of Massachusetts, and Yale University. She recently launched the Human Voicebank Initiative, an effort to collect a million voice samples from English speakers worldwide.