Message and Voice Banking

People with declining speech abilities may wish to preserve some aspects of their speech through voice banking, message banking, and/or digital legacies. These are strategies used to digitally record speech by people with degenerative conditions, such as ALS/MND, for later use once their speech abilities decline. You can learn more about each strategy here.  

Voice Banking

Voice banking is a strategy for creating a synthetic version of someone’s voice for later use on speech generating devices (SGD). It involves recording hundreds or thousands of sentences so that the computer can sample the person’s vocal qualities in different linguistic contexts and use that information to create a synthetic voice modeled after the person’s own speech. Options for Voice Banking include:

• Model Talker
• CereVoice Me
• VocalID
• My Own Voice

Message Banking

Message banking is a strategy for creating a pool of pre-recorded messages using a person’s natural speech while it is still intelligible. By recording dozens or hundreds of phrases, sentences, and questions, the individual can then utilize those files to express themselves later in life when speech intelligibility has declined. You can learn more about message banking here. My Message Banking, hosted by Tobii Dynavox, is one popular option for web-based message banking.

Digital Legacy

In some cases, individuals with degenerative conditions may also wish to create a longer video or audio recording with a meaningful message to family and friends. You can learn more about that process here.

Record Me Now is one option for creating Digital Legacies.