Cancer stole her voice. AI, curse words and children's books saved it
JULY 22, 20251:17 PM ET
When doctors told her they had to remove her tongue and voice box to save her life from the cancer that had invaded her mouth, Sonya Sotinsky sat down with a microphone to record herself saying the things she would never again be able to say.
“Happy birthday" and "I'm proud of you" topped the phrases she banked for her husband and two daughters, as well as "I'll be right with you," intended for customers at the architecture firm she co-owns in Tucson, Arizona.
Thinking about the grandchildren she desperately hoped to see born one day, she also recorded herself reading more than a dozen children's books, from
Eloise to Dr. Seuss, to one day play for them at bedtime.
But one of the biggest categories of sound files she banked was a string of curse words and filthy sayings. If the voice is the primary expression of personality, sarcasm and profanity are essential to Sotinsky's.
“When you can't use your voice, it is very, very frustrating. Other people project what they think your personality is. I have silently screamed and screamed at there being no scream," said Sotinsky in a recent interview, referring to rudimentary voice technology or writing notes by hand. "What the literal you-know-what?"
Fighting invasive oral cancer at age 51 forced Sotinsky to confront the existential importance of the human voice. Her unique intonation, cadence and slight New Jersey accent, she felt, were fingerprints of her identity. And she refused to be silenced.
While her doctors and insurance company saved her life, they showed little interest in saving her voice, she said. So she set out on her own to research and identify the artificial intelligence company that could. It used the recordings Sotinsky banked of her natural voice to build an exact replica now stored in an app on her phone, allowing her to type and speak once again with a full range of sentiment and sarcasm.
"She got her sass back," said Sotinsky's daughter, Ela Fuentevilla, 23. "When we heard her AI voice, we all cried, my sister, my dad and I. It's crazy similar."
"Your voice is your identity"
It took close to a year for doctors to catch Sotinsky's cancer. She complained to her orthodontist and dentist multiple times about jaw pain and a strange sensation under her tongue. Then water began dribbling down her chin when she drank. When the pain got so intense she could no longer speak at the end of each day, Sotinsky insisted her orthodontist take a closer look.
A shadow cast over his face. I saw it when he leaned back," she said, "that look you don't want to see."
That's when she started recording. In the five weeks between her diagnosis and surgery to remove her entire tongue and voice box – in medical terms, a total glossectomy and laryngectomy – she banked as much of her voice as she could manage.
"Your voice is your identity," said
Dr. Sue Yom, a radiation oncologist at UC-San Francisco, where Sotinsky got treatment. "Communication is not only how we express ourselves and relate to other people, but also how we make sense of the world."
"When the voice is no longer available, you can't hear yourself thinking out loud, you can't hear yourself interacting with other people," Yom said. "It impacts how your mind works."
People who lose their voice box, she added, are at
higher risk for long-term emotional distress, depression and physical pain compared with those who retain it after cancer treatment. Close to a
third lose their job, and the
social isolation can be profound.
Most laryngectomy patients learn to
speak again with an electrolarynx, a small battery-operated box held against the throat that produces a monotonic, mechanical voice. But without a tongue to shape her words, Sotinsky knew that wouldn't work for her.
When Sotinsky had her surgery in January 2022, AI voices were still in their infancy. The best technology she could find yielded a synthetic version of her voice, but it was still flat and robotic, and others strained to understand her.
She got by until mid-2024, when she read about tech companies using generative AI to replicate a person's full range of natural inflection and emotion.
While companies can now recreate a person's voice from snippets of old home movies or even a one-minute voicemail, 30 minutes is the sweet spot.
Sotinsky had banked hours in her children's book readings.
"Eloise saved my voice," Sotinsky said.
Now she types what she wants to say into a text-to-speech app on her phone, called
Whisper, which translates and broadcasts her AI voice through portable speakers.
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