Message Banking

MESSAGE BANKING & VOICE BANKING

Message banking is the process of recording phrases, messages and vocabulary for the purpose of incorporating the digitised recordings into an AAC system if the person requires such a system due to permanent or temporary reduction or loss of intelligible speech. John Costello, the founder and pioneer of Message Bankng has differentiated the terms “Message Banking” and “Voice Banking”.

Voice Banking (also called Voice Building) refers to the process of recording natural voice which is then synthesised into a computerised version of the unique voice. Once the synthesised voice has been produced and installed, messages are produced by converting text-to-speech. In our AAC devices we currently achieve this using commercial speech synthesis software such as Nuance (RealSpeak) and Acapela. The datasets underlying the high quality commercial voices is extensive and produced by professionals in recording studios. Voice-building software is available which permits a smaller datasets of the target voice to be recorded. The result is likely to be personalised, although not as high quality as the professional synthesized voices. ModelTalker is an example of this type of Voice-building software for VoiceBanking. At present multiple hours of recording is required, but there are projects underway around the world using donor voices as a basis, which aim to make available a process requiring shorter recording sessions of the target voice.

Wondering where to start?

John Costello from Boston Children’s Hospital has created this useful document of phrases that their patients have banked. You can take a look here.

Message Banking services have become available through https://mymessagebanking.com/.

Here is an outline of the process with mymessagebanking.com:

The system will guide you through the message banking process, help organize the messages, store the messages until they are needed, and provide ways to download the messages for use on any system that can play back those messages. Use of the system, storing messages and downloading stored messages is free for personal use. Hosting of this site is provided by Tobii Dynavox and uses the standard myTobiiDynavox account security. These accounts are free for all users and can be used on both myMessageBanking.com and myTobiiDynavox.com sites.

Some more background:

An individual who is diagnosed with a condition which affects speech, may desire to preserve his or her messages and unique expressions.

It is ideal to start the process of Message Banking well before speech begins to change. Sometimes change may occur more rapidly than anticipated and the optimum recording opportunity may pass. It is possible that there is no contact with a Speech Pathologist at this stage, so the individual or case manager or other representative may start the processs. If a Speech Pathologist is available to assist, this would be helpful as the process moves towards integrating the messages to a Speech Generating Device or AAC system. Speech Pathologists have expertise in communication and language, so even if speech is not the focus of therapy, meetings with Speech Pathologists are routinely used to set up and implement Speech Generating Devices or AAC systems.

Zyteq offers a microphone kit and some recording messages for Message Banking. At this point it might also be useful to consider how the messages can be used in the future. In Zyteq’s product range we offer several tablet computer systems with software such as Grid 3 which would be suitable AAC systems to integrate the banked messages. Information can be provided about these systems and demo software supplied (and download instructions supplied). The kit may be purchased from Zyteq directly, or some organisations such as MND associations or Speech Pathology departments may own suitable microphones for borrowing, for recording messages.

Grid 3 and Message Banking: