About Rupal

Dr. Rupal Patel is an internationally recognized speech scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor dedicated to giving a personalized voice to the voiceless. She is the founder of VocaliD, a pioneering voice technology company that creates custom digital voices for people with speech impairments, often due to conditions like ALS or cerebral palsy. Instead of relying on a generic computer voice, VocaliD uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to blend a small sample of the patient’s own residual vocal characteristics (like pitch and melody) with recordings from a similar-sounding donor in their crowdsourced Human Voicebank. The result is a unique synthetic voice that conveys the user’s vocal personality. After selling VocaliD to Veritone in 2022, Rupal served as Vice President of Voice AI and Accessibility, leading initiatives on generative AI and ethical voice technology. In 2024, she returned full-time to Northeastern University as a tenured professor with joint appointments in Health Sciences and Computer Sciences. Her current research at Northeastern, where she directs the Voice of Women (VOxx) Lab, continues to focus on speech science and a new idea she calls “the sound of health.” This work explores how a person’s voice can be used as a simple biomarker to diagnose, monitor, and treat neurological and physiological conditions. Rupal’s groundbreaking work has been featured on TED and NPR, and she is a co-founder of AITHOS, a group committed to the ethical use of synthetic media.