Apple Shares ‘The Lost Voice’ Short Film, Companion Ebook

As this year’s International Day of People with Disabilities approaches this Sunday, December 3, Apple on Thursday released a short film and ebook called The Lost Voice. The film, shot on location in New Zealand and directed by Taika Waititi, tells the story of a girl and the fanciful creatures who look for one of their voices. The film is narrated by Dr. Tristram Ingham, a physician and disability advocate who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy called facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. He uses iOS 17’s Personal Voice feature to narrate the film.

Apple posted a piece about Dr. Ingham to its Newsroom site.

Alongside the film, Apple has released a ebook version of the book featured in the film itself. In addition to Personal Voice, The Lost Voice also showcases a feature on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS called Live Speech. The software, a complementary tool to Personal Voice, allows people to type responses which can then be read aloud by the system voice or in one’s Personal Voice. Live Speech is intended to be useful in conversational settings, such as when giving an order at a coffee shop like Starbucks. Both Personal Voice and Live Speech run on-device using machine learning; Personal Voice can be saved to iCloud—which uses end-to-end encryption—in the event a device is lost or upgraded.

Upon its unveiling back in May for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple boasted Personal Voice was built in collaboration with many in the ALS community, including those from the Team Gleason Foundation. It was a rightful claim, as ALS inevitably causes people to lose the ability to talk. The essential idea behind Personal Voice is to more or less preempt the loss of one’s voice by allowing someone to record their voice and have it saved for posterity. This way, once someone indeed does lose their ability to speak naturally, they can still communicate with family and friends using the Personal Voice that sounds exactly like them. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see why Apple’s new short film is titled the way it is. Personal Voice truly does let someone preserve their voice before it’s intractably lost forever by a disease such as ALS.

It’s also worth noting this isn’t the first time ALS and Team Gleason has been covered in this column. I have interviewed former Bachelor contestant Sarah Trott twice over the last couple years about her personal connection with ALS, as well as her advocacy for awareness of the disease and for caregiving. Trott, a former broadcast journalist at the ABC affiliate in Palm Springs, quit her job in 2019 to become full-time caretaker for her father, who had ALS. Trott currently is working as the director of digital marketing at Aidaly, a startup focused on using tech to make sorely-needed resources more accessible to caregivers everywhere.

Today’s release of The Lost Voice comes exactly a year after Apple released a similarly spirited short film called The Greatest. The release also coincided with the International Day of People with Disabilities.