Congresswoman Wexton from Virginia fights degenerative diseases and finds her voice through AI

“My new – old – AI voice,” she called it in a recent video introducing it to her voters.

Wexton made headlines this year by using a robotic-sounding voice app to deliver remarks in the House of Representatives. It was a widely praised show of resilience, but the app didn’t sound like her.

This week, Wexton showed off her new, more natural-sounding voice as she spoke before the House Budget Committee, occasionally touching the walker she has been using since she was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a Parkinson’s-like condition.

“Those of you who heard me speak before PSP took my voice away may think your ears are deceiving you now,” she told the committee via an app on her iPad. “I assure you that’s not the case. I’m using a new AI model of my voice today – I know it’s pretty cool.”

The cadence, the tone, the timbre – it all sounded remarkably like the Wexton who spent five years in the Virginia Senate before being elected to Congress in 2018. She is not seeking re-election this fall. because of their health condition.

For her employees, the moment was more than cool.

“It was a big deal. We didn’t expect to hear anything like that again,” Justin McCartney, Wexton’s communications director, said Friday.

Wexton, 56, has lost none of her wit and intelligence, McCartney said, but it is difficult to communicate verbally because of the neurological disorder. For those who have been close to Wexton over the years, the AI Voice “brought back something that a lot of people didn’t realize how much they had missed,” he said.

In a written response to questions from The Washington Post on Friday, Wexton said, “I never will be, but I am more than I or anyone around me ever thought I would be.” After having to turn down speaking engagements and public appearances because she could no longer trust her own voice, Wexton said technology has given her back the ability to “continue to do my best in this job that I love.”

The first sample of her AI voice that she heard was a snippet of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy. “My husband had a big smile on his face,” she said. “I haven’t seen him so beaming and genuinely (happy) in a long time,” she said, adding that she enjoyed seeing her friends and colleagues’ reactions to it.

“Hearing my friend’s voice again was an incredibly moving moment,” Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger said by email Friday. “And while I know this new voice was made possible by a computer, I know the wise words – and the clever but snarky jokes – we will hear from it are Jennifer’s and Jennifer’s alone.”

When Wexton was scheduled to give a speech to the House of Representatives late last year in support of a bill to eradicate Parkinson’s disease, she wrote a speech and had Representative Jennifer McClellan (D-Virginia) read it. It was a humbling moment, McClellan said in an interview with The Washington Post on Friday.

“For someone who is so self-reliant and has built her career on using her voice for others – first as a prosecutor, then as a legislator – to have to rely on someone else to speak on her behalf was very difficult,” McClellan said. “I think the AI ​​software has given her some of her power back in a very moving way.”

Wexton acknowledged the pitfalls of AI in her comments to the Washington Post, saying, “It’s scary to think about the bad things someone with bad intentions could do using this technology.” She has restricted access to the tool on her team, “because if I use my voice to say something without my consent, that could cause real problems.”

Experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about the technology’s potential to disrupt politics. A January report from the Wilson Center warned that with national elections looming this year in countries around the world, “the risk of ‘blurring the walls of reality,’ as one analyst put it, through the use of AI-generated and more conventional deepfake productions is disturbingly high.”

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found late last year that generative AI is already being used in political ads and infomercials in the U.S. and is “poised to redefine modern electioneering.” The center’s report noted, however, that Congress has not yet addressed the issue.

McClellan said the introduction of AI in Wexton demonstrates the need to update laws and regulations.

The Wexton voice model came about after a video of her using the text-to-speech app in May caught the attention of ElevenLabs, a New York-based AI voice startup. The company contacted the congresswoman’s staff, and after she gave the green light, staff spent a couple of weeks compiling more than an hour of audio clips of Wexton speaking before the disease affected her voice.

It took the company just a few days to create a digital version of Wexton’s voice. An ElevenLabs spokesperson said artificial intelligence makes it possible not only to imitate a voice, but to modulate the sound so that it sounds natural, rather than robotic.

“Our model is able to understand the relationships between words and adjust pronunciation depending on context … to produce lifelike, human-sounding speech,” Sam Sklar, a spokesman for ElevenLabs, said by email.

Wexton’s office pays a small subscription fee to ElevenLabs for the service, McCartney said.

ElevenLabs, which will be launched in 2022, has approached other public figures with a similar offer, such as former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and trial attorney Lori Cohen of Greenberg Traurig, who uses an AI version of her voice to argue cases in the courtroom.

“It’s clear there’s still work to be done to adequately protect against the potential dangers,” Wexton said in her video. “But it can also provide new, unimaginable and life-changing opportunities for Americans with disabilities.”