Voice technology created the 1963 speech JFK never gave

The speech which President John F. Kennedy was due to deliver on the day of his assassination has been recreated with voice synthesis technology.

Kennedy was on his way to give the speech when he was shot dead while driving through Dallas with his presidential motorcade.

The text, however, survived. And voice synthesis experts have been able to bring the speech to life by synthesising 116,777 voice samples to create the illusion of a fluent performance.

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Scottish voice company CereProc stitched together parts from 831 separate JFK recordings, each of which was around 0.4 seconds long, to form the full 2,590-word address. The project took two months.

The recording was published the morning of March 16, 2018, on the website of The Times newspaper, which commissioned the project.

A small excerpt can also be heard at the end of this video:

55 years after he was killed, JFK gives his final speech https://t.co/zjKYu2rKaT pic.twitter.com/9k4TFVE00z

— The Times of London (@thetimes) March 16, 2018

Kennedy's speech (published here in full by the JFK Presidential Library), was dedicated in part to the recently-established Graduate Research Center of the Southwest.

It reads in part as a rebuke of populism, emphasising that the US must be "guided by the lights of learning and reason" and wary of populists with "swift and simple solutions to every world problem."

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Here's an excerpt:

This link between leadership and learning is not only essential at the community level. It is even more indispensable in world affairs. Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country's security.

 

In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America's leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.