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Its easy for most people to tell others what they want, but its actually a luxury that those with speech disorders dont have. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 7.5 million people in the US have trouble using their voices, and now a program called VocaliD wants to help these individuals by having others donate their voices to make customized, synthetic ones that those with impairments can use. The process starts with VocaliDs cofounder and speech scientist Rupal Patel and her group of specialists who listen to the sounds a patient can make to hear what their voice could sound like. Then they find a surrogate who is similar in age and sex to the patient, and that surrogate speaks and records thousands of sample sentences from books like White Fang or The Velveteen Rabbit.