Cancer took away Alice Harty’s voice. But family, friends, doctors and artificial intelligence helped her get it back.
Harty, 39, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2021. Despite years of surgeries and radiation treatment, the cancer spread from her thyroid to her voice box. That meant another surgery, and this time her medically ravaged voice would be gone for good.
Days before her laryngectomy, she met with John Costello, a speech-language pathologist and director of the augmentative communication program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
He said he could help her create a voice clone.
“By the time I saw him, I was under the wire with time and it was only days until my surgery,” Harty said in an email to WBUR. “Fortunately my family and friends were able to send me about three minutes of voice recording, pre-hoarse voice, and we used those to make the voice clone.”
Those precious seconds of sound were enough for Costello. He edited the files to remove any background noise and uploaded them to an online tool offered by ElevenLabs, an AI company that specializes in “digital replicas of any voice.” The program generated a copy of Harty’s voice in less than 90 seconds.
Now, when Harty types a message on her phone, a speaker she clips to her collar, responds in her voice.
Hearing her own voice was a profound moment for Harty.
“What was it like at that point to hear my voice?” she wrote in an email, “The greatest gift I could ask for.”
It was a big moment for Costello, too, when he and Harty first created the voice clone.
“The smiles, the laughter, the tears that represented preservation of self, the ability to continue to have that acoustical fingerprint that is the reflection of who we are,” Costello said.
Harty is one of a growing number of people who have turned to AI to replicate their voice.
“The idea of voice cloning has gone from nobody being aware of it to it being a standard,” Costello wrote in an email to WBUR.
Around 10,000 people have used ElevenLabs’ service to clone their voice, according to Gabi Leibowitz, who leads the company’s impact team.
ElevenLabs partnered with Boston Children’s in 2024 to help preserve voices. Costello said he initially reached out to the company’s founder about the idea.
The software was developed as an audio platform for developers, musicians and other creators. Using it as an assistive technology was a welcomed discovery, according to Leibowitz.
“It was so far superior to everything else that this population had access to that it was revolutionary,” she said.
Before AI cloning, most patients used traditional “voice banking,” where they’d record a predetermined list of phrases that are then used to generate a synthetic voice that resembles the patient’s natural speech.
But, proactive recording for voice banking is crucial.
“ There was a sort of a ‘it’s too late’ vibe about voice banking, where, if your voice had already changed, you were sort of out of luck,” Leibowitz said.
AI voice cloning, on the other hand, allows patients to use old recordings to restore their voices, even after their condition has changed how they sound. The platform can process voices in 73 different languages.
Cloning your voice in the age of deepfakes
Creating a voice clone comes with a lot of other considerations. Harty said she was eager at first, but had to stop and think through all the different aspects of the process.
Specifically, she had concerns about preserving her privacy, and preventing others from accessing her voice.
The rise of AI voice clones has also led to the rise of AI voice scams. Scammers can impersonate politicians, celebrities and family members.
Costello said he hears constantly from patients who are worried about scammers using their voice to access their banking information or contact loved ones.
In response, Costello helped draft Boston Children’s guidelines around voice cloning, and published an article for medical staff using voice agents. The guidelines set safeguards for privacy and security. This includes secure storage, encryption and strong password protection.
“We’re only working with companies that are doing the utmost to make sure that there are full protections for the voice,” said Costello.
Costello’s guidelines also walk patients through more philosophical and ethical concerns: Who has access to their voice agent? For how long? What happens to their voice when they die?
“When I die, I’d like my voice not to exist anymore,” Harty wrote in an email to WBUR.
Costello has heard a full range of thoughts on voice legacy from his patients. He included some on the last page of his guidelines.
“This is great, I don’t care if my family has this after I die. They will have lots of laughs at my expense and that feels good to know,” wrote one anonymous patient.
“As much as I’m uncomfortable with the thought of photoshopped images of me doing things I didn’t do, I feel the same about someone expressing their thoughts with my voice and passing them off as mine,” another person reflected.
Leibowitz said security and safety are top priorities at ElevenLabs, too. No one can clone a voice without a verification step which requires a person’s consent. She added that the company has detection systems that report misuse.
Room for Improvement
Costello said the AI agent currently tries to convey emotion and tone based on context from punctuation and previous messages. That doesn’t always work in practice for Harty.
“Sometimes I’m really relaxed about something and it comes out like I’m all hyped out or stressed,” she said.
Costello said the technology also hasn’t completely nailed other intonations like laughter or singing. Singing is something Harty misses deeply.
“I think I’d sing a Billie Holiday song first if I could,” she wrote.
Leibowitz said ElevenLabs’ technology is improving, pointing to a recent example of an ALS patient who performed with his band on stage using a voice clone.
Despite its imperfections, Harty said she has no regrets about cloning her voice.
“I use this every day, all the time in almost every interaction,” she said. “I depend on it.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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