When Hawking had the opportunity to switch to a more modern voice in 2006, he stuck with his original voice, saying, “I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.” Stephen Hawking was a special user of speech technology and, understandably, he preferred to stay with the older technology because it was HIS voice. Some of its peculiarities were due to using one of the oldest approaches, speech synthesis by rule, with a voice created by the speech technology pioneer Dennis Klatt. One of the most famous synthetic voices was the one used by Stephen Hawking. Human: Computer, can you recognize speech?Ĭomputer: I think you said, can you wreck a nice beach?īoth the quality of synthesized speech and the capability of communicating with a computer using your voice have come a long way since the debut of this technology in the 1970s.