India Post News Service
In 1963, at the age of 21, Stephen Hawking was stricken with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and his motor functions deteriorated until he was left almost completely paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.
As a great physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking suffered from ALS disease and died on March 14. Due to ALS he could not speak for many years. Hari Vyas of San Jose designed a Voice Synthesizer board and Dr. Stephen Hawking used it for many years. Georgia Tech Alumnus Hari Vyas shared a special connection with the legendary scientist that lasted for decades.
Hari Vyas invented the voice synthesizer board in 1983 while working as hardware engineer at SpeechPlus company in Mt. View. The hardware includes microcontroller, DSP, telephone interface, audio amplifier and PC interface. Dr Hawking evaluated many Voice Synthesizers but he liked the voice of Hari’s design. The board was real time text to speech with unlimited vocabulary. Hari worked with software group and linguists to integrate into hardware. The algorithm was developed by late Dr. Klatt of MIT.
Hari Vyas came from Kanjari, Gujarat, India after passing B.E. degree from Birla Vishwakarma Mahavidyalay Engineering College in Vidyanagar. He graduated from Georgia Tech with M.S. degree in EE. Previous to joining SpeechPlus, Hari worked as engineer at NCR and National Semiconductor. In 1983 there were no PC SW to design the schematics so Hari drew all the hand drawn schematics and the prototype worked first time! The Voice Synthesizer model CT-5000 used by late Dr Stephen Hawking was designed for blind programmers and stock market application.
Hari was in constant touch with Jonathan Wood, Hawking’s graduate assistant from the University of Cambridge to help out in case of any problem with the voice Synthesizer. Hari assisted to debug boards. Surprisingly the board designed in 1983 worked until Dr Hawking died. Hari regrets that the voice of the board will never be heard again. While at SpeechPlus, Hari Vyas helped other people who could not speak due to paralysis or throat cancer. Hari has two patents on this Voice Synthesizer and a total of five patents.
Dr Hawking sent a signed book “A Brief History of Time” to Hari.
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