A radio reporter was on the verge of losing his job when he was diagnosed with a rare condition called tongue protrusion dystonia.
Source: http://jamiedupree.blog.ajc.comThe condition prevented him from speaking.
My voice is in there. From time to time, words fall out of my mouth that sound normal. But for the most part, I can’t speak more than one or two words at a time before it goes haywire, he wrote on his blog
Jamie Dupree, who started his radio career in 1983, will make his return to the airwaves thanks to an app and years of archived audio.
He works at Cox Media Group and his colleagues there sought a high-tech solution to get him back on air.
I can talk a little with a pen in my mouth, getting out words and phrases that are more slurred than anything else.
A Scottish Company has been working through years of Dupree's audio to "build a voice". Dupree wrote that when that's paired with a text-to-speech application, it will sound like him.
On his blog, he wrote
Does the voice sound perfect? No. But it does sound like me.
When I type out some words – the text-to-speech program that I use spits them out in my new Jamie Dupree 2.0 voice.
And starting next week, the plan is for me to again feed stories to our Cox Media Group news-talk radio stations, and be back on the air in our hourly newscasts, reporting the news from Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C.Yes, it will probably sound robotic to some of my listeners; but for the first time in two years, I will be back on the radio.
Jamie Dupree 2.0 is here – and I couldn’t be more excited about it!
Good luck with your return to the airwaves Jamie, we're sure your listeners have been missing you and you've been missing them!
