THE LOST VOICE

About the Work Released for International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Apple’s latest campaign ‘The Lost Voice’ promotes a life-changing new accessibility feature called Personal Voice. From speaking with loved ones to reading a bedtime story, your voice can be an important part of what makes you, you. Yet millions of people around the world are at risk of losing their ability to speak, due to degenerative conditions like Motor Neurone Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, cancers and dementia. Until now those with such conditions have been compelled to use robotic-sounding text-to-speech readers. Personal Voice digitally recreates your own voice on your device, so if you ever subsequently lose the ability to speak, you can then continue to communicate through your Apple products in a voice that sounds like you. To tell the story of this innovative feature we created a hero film entitled ‘The Lost Voice.’ It told the storybook tale of a young girl and her magical friend, as they search high and low for his missing voice, before revealing that the story is being narrated by a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter using Personal Voice. It features a genuine user of the technology and their Personal Voice was authentically used to create the narration for the film. We then counterpointed this recreated, virtual voice with a poignant track by recording duo X Carbon, composed entirely of authentic human voice samples. A real storybook was also published in hardback, alongside a free accessible e-book, available on Apple Books. The film launched globally and has been widely acclaimed by disability advocates, industry press and the general public with 18 million views. “Powerful in its portrayal of the universal message of the critical, life-altering promise of accessible technology in our world” Forbes “Thank you Apple for telling stories that speak disabled truths” Disability Activist, Maayan Ziv