HP Innovation Journal Issue 04: Fall 2016 | Page 18

INNOVATION SPOTLIGHT
Steven Hawking gets to Roar
by T
 icky Thakkar, VP, HP Fellow, Director of the Emerging Compute Lab and Personal Systems
Chief Technologist, HP; Tom Paddock, CEO, Sound Research ® Corporation
barely drive the speed limit. I came away from
that meeting deeply impressed, he was such a
down-to-earth guy. He inspired me.”
“Overall the meeting went well,” Ticky re-
called, “Professor Hawking was encouraged and
commented that our efforts were ‘close’, how-
ever there was still an opportunity to do better.”
Since then, Ticky has continued to think about
Professor Hawking — and be on the watch for
any emerging technology that could provide
viable solutions.
In 1985, Stephen Hawking — the famous English the-
oretical physicist, cosmologist, and author — lost his
ability to speak following an emergency tracheotomy.
Since then, Professor Hawking has relied on comput-
er hardware that turns text into speech to be able to
communicate.
At a conference in 1997, Intel’s co-founder Gordon
Moore met the Professor and promised him that Intel
would provide computer voice assistance and wheel-
chair control technology in perpetuity. Intel has been
designing custom computer and audio systems for
Professor Hawking’s wheelchair ever since.
The chance of a lifetime
In 2003, Ticky Thakkar (now Head of the
Emerging Compute Lab and Chief Technologist
of Personal Systems at HP), was Chief Systems
Architect with Intel. Early that summer Ticky
was contacted by Professor Stephen Hawking’s
assistant about two issues with the Professor’s
voice equipment.
The first and most pressing issue was porta-
bility. The voice equipment was bulky and was
powered by his wheelchair battery and various
power supplies. Consequently, whenever he was
away from the chair, he was without any means
of voice communication. This situation was ex-
ceptionally acute when Professor Hawking had
to fly for any length of time, as the wheelchair
was stored in the hold of the airplane.
The second issue concerned the lack of re-
placement “current” technology for the hardware
voice synthesizer. Professor Hawking’s distinctive
synthesized voice had been created in the early
1980s by Dennis Klatt, an engineer at MIT, but
in the intervening years since Professor Hawking
began using his “CallText 5010” synthesizers,
most of the electronic components were no lon-
ger being manufactured and Hawking’s three re-
maining voice synthesizers could not be repaired
18 Innovation Journal · Issue 4 · Fall 2016
Stephen Hawking masters
his own voice
Meeting at Professor Hawking’s house in Pasadena, CA
2004. Stephen Hawking (bottom-left); Ticky Thakkar
(right);
if they failed for any reason.
Over the next several months, Ticky’s team
spent countless hours working on a variety of
software solutions utilizing the latest technolo-
gy. The majority of their time was spent trying
to overcome the hardest challenge of all: repro-
ducing Hawking’s signature voice.
Finally, after almost a year of effort, Ticky was
ready to present his team’s work to Professor
Hawking in person.
“Hello Ticky, nice to meet you.
I am Stephen Hawking.”
Those were the first distinctive words heard by
Ticky when he finally met Professor Hawking for
the first time in the spring of 2004.
“I remember it as if it was yesterday,” Ticky
said. “It was a beautiful spring day. The sun was
shining, the air crisp and clear. I was so excited to
finally meet Professor Hawking face-to-face and
review my team’s efforts with him, that I could
In 2013, Professor Hawking asked Intel to provide
him with a next-generation, portable speaker de-
sign that would enable him to give understand-
able lectures to larger audiences, easily talk with
friends and family at social gatherings, and pro-
vide (as Hawking later said to Tom Paddock, CEO
of Sound Research) “…sufficient decibels to be
heard at a cocktail party — although perhaps not
Glastonbury!” In response, David Rittenhouse and
Travis Bonifield of Intel contacted Sound Research
with a challenge: collaborate with Intel to create
a far-field voice speaker that would: mount un-
obtrusively on Hawking’s existing wheelchair; be
able to amplify Hawking’s voice at sound levels
approaching 100 decibels, adjust the sound field
to match Hawking’s exact audio quality “ear-tun-
ing” requirements, project Hawking’s voice with a
hemispherical dispersion pattern (or “2π”) and run
using the same voltage as a PC. Without hesita-
tion, Sound Research accepted Intel’s challenge.
Tom had been working on a next-generation
portable speaker with HP’s Jon Dory, Program
Manager, called “HP Roar+“ which featured Sound
Edge ® tuning and smart amplifier optimization