JFK Unsilenced
The Times
Project Overview
On 22 November 1963, JFK was assassinated en route to the Dallas Trade Mart, leaving his final 22-minute speech undelivered. Five decades later, The Times launched its platform "Find Your Voice."
As Executive Producer and Creative Partner, I was responsible for campaign and technology from brief to delivery. Partnering with audio engineers at CereProc, we analyzed 831 speeches, harvested 116,000+ phonetic units from analog recordings, and built an AI model capable of performing the complete speech in Kennedy’s authentic cadence and Boston accent.
Working with synthetic audio in 2018 meant operating without a playbook. I was responsible for steering the project through uncharted legal, technical, and ethical territory to ensure the execution held up under global scrutiny.
Final Outcome
Pioneered Ethical AI: Delivered one of the first commercial uses of AI voice cloning at scale, sparking global debate on synthetic media ethics six years before generative AI went mainstream.
Earned Global Reach: Achieved widespread international news coverage, including direct editorial features in competitor titles (The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Washington Post).
Commercial & Creative Impact: Driven 4,500+ new digital subscribers for The Times and awarded the Grand Prix for Creative Data at Cannes Lions, alongside top honors at Clios, D&AD, and The One Show.
Humanitarian Legacy: The underlying voice-reconstruction pipeline was later deployed to help ALS patients clone and retain their natural speech.
Enduring Academic & Tech Legacy: Recognised in textbooks, digital forensics, and AI ethics research (including scholars at Yale and UC Berkeley) as a foundational case study in responsible voice synthesis and "benevolent deepfakes."