"The Pioneering MIT Scientist Behind Stephen Hawking's Famous Voice"
Stephen Hawking's iconic computer-generated voice, used for the last three decades of his life, was a reproduction of the real-life voice of pioneering scientist Dennis Klatt, who developed state-of-the-art computer systems for speech synthesis. Klatt's speech synthesizers, including the popular Perfect Paul, marked a turning point in speech synthesis by using a mathematical model to represent the human vocal tract and produce highly intelligible speech. This approach revolutionized speech synthesis technology and laid the foundation for modern AI-driven speech systems like Siri and Alexa.