Electrolarynx

A handheld battery-powered device that produces mechanical vibrations to generate speech for people who have lost their larynx (voice box), typically due to laryngeal cancer surgery. The device is held against the neck or cheek, where it transmits vibrations through the tissue into the oral cavity. The user then articulates these vibrations using their mouth, tongue, and lips to produce intelligible speech. While electrolaryngeal speech is highly intelligible, it typically sounds monotonous and robotic because the mechanical vibrations lack the natural pitch variations of human speech. Research is ongoing to enhance electrolarynx devices with automatic pitch control using machine learning to produce more natural-sounding speech.