Voice for Motor Neurone Disease sufferers

It's been five years since a friend, who I deeply miss, died from motor neurone disease (Lou Gehrig's). Among people he knew, he was very outgoing and talkative, interesting as a person but also interested in what others were doing. That's not just a eulogy, he was my youth group leader and someone I looked up to hugely as I was growing up.

It was his loss of speech that made the biggest impact. From being the life and soul of any gathering, he was reduced to typing on a portable speech synthesizer which then spoke in a harshly metallic American accent. I'm sure that you over the other side of the pond will understand that it was incongruous and simply emphasised what was happening.

I propose (well, my wife proposes and I second) that upon diagnosis, sufferers should have the opportunity to record the set of sounds and words that a speech synthesizer uses. Then in future, while they may no longer be able to speak, at least their machine will sound a little more like them.