Analysis Of Professor Rupal Patel's Speech

A Unique Voiceprint
At the TEDWomen Conference 2013, Professor Rupal Patel of Northeastern University presented a TED Talk called, “Synthetic Voices, as unique as fingerprints.” As a speech scientist, she wanted to engineer a solution that focused on building customized voices for people with speech impairments. She started the Human Voicebank Initiative, which allows people of all walks-of-life to donate their voices to the VOCALiD project for infusion into compatible speech-impaired voices. This bank made the matches between donors and receivers based on the receivers’ personalities, physiques, and emotional capacities. With exemplary implementation of ethos, logos, and pathos, Professor Patel inspired and persuaded the audience to help her
Patel maintained a level of credibility throughout her speech beginning with a strong ‘Initial Credibility’ stage and culminating with the Terminal phase. Her ‘Initial Credibility’ was established through her title, ‘Professor Rupal Patel,’ and her confidence-instilling posture, which included a straight back and amiable facial expressions when delivering the speech. These types of external characteristics of a speaker, such as posture, title, and poise, personify the first stage of Good Sense. To solidify the ‘Derived Credibility’ of her presentation delivery, she used her PowerPoint slides effectively and engaged the audience with rhetorical questions for them to contemplate. Finally, she drove home her ‘Good Sense’ framework by strengthening her reliability through an impressive enumeration of her past accomplishments in her field of study, Neurophysiology and Speech Language Pathology. She mentioned that she conducted past research with the help of the National Science Foundation and “created custom crafted voices, and created VOCALiD, …a bank for voices”. By talking about how her research was successful and by providing concrete, multiple case studies and examples, the speaker established ‘Terminal Credibility’. Her continued, supported proof from her research, experiences, and findings allowed the listener to ultimately conclude that she was a credible speaker, who executed the three stages of ‘Good Sense’ with perfection. With the successful case studies presented, she displayed her preparedness on the topic and her intentions on what she plans to do with the research that she has conducted. One case study that she used to build pathos and logos was about a nine-year old named Samantha. Professor Patel tells the audience how her findings allowed a little girl with speech impairment to have a customized voice and lets the audience