The Impossible Bedtime Story
ProLiteracy
Project Overview
A parent reading aloud is one of the strongest predictors of how a child will do in life. But 43 million adults in the United States, and 773 million worldwide, cannot read to their children. For ProLiteracy, with Droga5, Accenture and voice-cloning company Respeecher, I set out to give any parent their own reading voice, whatever their literacy level. We recorded a voice actor reading children's books, recorded Felicia, a mother of four learning to read, telling her life story, then used machine learning to build her voice reading the books she could not yet read herself. For the first time, she heard herself tell her sons a bedtime story.
Final Outcome
Two Webby Awards, for Best Art Direction and Accessible Technology. The film, directed by SMUGGLER, reached 5,000 literacy organisations worldwide. It is now cited as the reference case for empathetic generative AI, proof that voice cloning, usually discussed as a threat, can be a tool for inclusion when it is built on consent.