ARLINGTON, Virginia (WHTM) — Ben Baldanza’s voice — both metaphorically and literally — was once among the loudest in the corporate world.
As CEO of Spirit Airlines — long ranked America’s most-hated airline by some metrics — Baldanza didn’t back down from the business model many Americans claimed to hate. Instead, he decided to embrace the hate and “hug the haters” — while noting maybe, considering how many people flew Spirit, they loved low fares more than they hated other things about the airline, like cramped seats and fees for things that had long been bundled into airline fares, such as seat assignments.
After Baldanza left Spirit, he taught airline economics (at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia), joined corporate boards (currently at JetBlue, which tried unsuccessfully to buy Spirit, and Six Flags, which is merging with the competing amusement park company Cedar Fair) and co-hosted the Airlines Confidential podcast.
But in 2022, Baldanza also learned he had ALS, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological disease that kills people as soon as two years after they’re diagnosed; few survive five years.
First, ALS affected his gross motor skills: his ability to walk, for example. But eventually, it affected — and then significantly debilitated — his speech. He says his mind — including his ability to make high-level strategic corporate decisions — remains unaffected. But anyone who didn’t know something was wrong knew if they listened to Airlines Confidential.
“When he couldn’t offer as much as he did before, it was really unfortunate,” Baldanza’s current co-host, Scott McCartney, said last week. (Disclosure: I was Baldanza’s first co-host; clearly — in airline parlance — he has “upgraded” since then…)
Baldanza and his wife, Marcia Baldanza, thought maybe artificial intelligence could help solve his speech challenges just as it was solving other problems (while — to be sure — also being accused of causing problems, from taking human jobs to enabling nefarious human behavior).
Text-to-voice technology wasn’t new, but Baldanza — never one to settle, and not one to start now — didn’t want just any voice.
“I told them I didn’t want a computer voice,” Baldanza recounted.
“They” were a team consisting of Marcia, Airlines Confidential producer Charlie Shapiro, a New York-based nonprofit organization called Bridging Voice and a London-based text-to-voice company — whose U.S. headquarters is in New York — called ElevenLabs.
Turns out Baldanza’s desire to be heard in not just any voice — but his own voice, how it sounded back before ALS — isn’t unusual.
“Everyone has a very emotional attachment to their voice,” said Dalton Pakkala, an enterprise director at ElevenLabs. “Being able to add that level of authenticity is very powerful for their loved ones, for their colleagues, to be able to continue living as much of a normal life as possible.”
The “new” AI voice comes from samples of the person’s pre-ALS voice, and fortunately — after more than 200 podcast episodes — Shapiro had no shortage of that to submit for Baldanza.
“Tens of thousands of people every week are looking to hear what Ben has to say, and to be able to have this much material was fantastic,” Shapiro said, adding: “The listeners were sticking with Ben either way, which I thought was fantastic.”
The result of the collaboration between Ben’s family, Shapiro, Bridging Voice and ElevenLabs? An Episode 229 in which Ben’s voice sounds a lot like it did back in Episode 1 and almost nothing like it did in Episode 228, the last week before Ben’s AI voice debuted.
“It’s fantastic,” Baldanza said of the AI voice. “It allows me to speak like I used to.”
He creates the voice by typing on a tablet keypad. ALS could eventually take away his ability to do even that — just as it could entirely take away his ability to (albeit with considerable effort at this point) use his natural voice — but Marcia Baldanza said they have already lined up other technology that will meet Ben wherever he is.
“If Ben’s muscles continue to fail him, there is an eye gaze technology that allows him to look at a screen, and it types in letters and phrases and paragraphs and speeches,” she said.
Shapiro said feedback from the new episode has been universally positive — feedback Baldanza invited with his usual humor.
“Let us know what you think of my voice,” he said at the end of the show, signing off. “Or if you prefer the breathy, garbled Ben.”
It would be reasonble to expect Ben’s new voice would lift his mood, after two years of a disease that usually follows a bad trajectory.
But the truth is even better.
“He’s remarkably optimistic,” Marcia Baldanza said. “And so his mood is always high, upbeat, hopeful. And this disease has not changed that at all.”
And the even bigger picture?
“You know, not everybody’s life turns out the way you want it to turn out,” Marcia Baldanza said. “This is the life we have, and this is the life we’re living. And it’s the life that we love.”