The Eyes That Found a Voice: Hoe Chris Johnson is Speaking Again

When former NFL star Chris Johnson revealed his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis, many people focused on what the disease had taken from him. But this episode is about what technology gave back—his voice, through eye-gaze tracking and AI.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I didn't welcome back. Nordoffs to another episode of the
most anticipated podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network entitled
I Didn't Know Maybe you didn't either, and today's episode
the stemming off a video I watched of the former
NFL running back Y two J Chris Johnson, who's been

(00:20):
diagnosed with and is battling ALS, and it took me
back to twenty fourteen. You remember when everybody was dumping
water on themselves to raise awareness for ALS. I remember
one of our freestyle funny comedy shows, me Chico Bean
and Darren brand downsd ourselves with two buckets of ice
cold water, and I think we challenged, like Emanuel Hudson

(00:42):
hit now Holler some other people from wilding out. They
never responded. Maybe they didn't care about ALS, but that's
not the point. The reality is the ice cold water
had nothing to do with ALS. Like a lot of
people said, oh, you poured a cold water on you,
and you know how your body goes into shock. Well
that's how people with als feel. Wrong. They chose ice

(01:03):
water because it was funny, It looked dramatic on video.
Almost anybody could do it. It made people want to nominate
their friends and it was Hella shable on social media.
It was no medical reason for it, but it was
a simple action, a public challenge, a twenty four hour deadline,
You nominate three people, and you donate to ALS research.
That combination is what made it super popular the summer

(01:24):
of twenty fourteen, and the campaign raised more than one
hundred and fifteen million dollars for the ALS Association in
the US and hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. But
to kick off today's episode, it is imperative that I
give you three of the most useless facts you'll never need, never,
not a day in life about ALS. And that's a

(01:46):
meotrophic lateral sclerosis. YEA told me about Foe takes to
say that correctly, So i'mna just keep it at ALS.
Okay up. First, ALS is often called Lou Garrick's disease.
Why well, Lou Garrick was a base legend and he
was diagnosed with ALS in nineteen thirty nine. Your second
useless fact about ALS. Your eyes are usually one of

(02:10):
the last muscles affected by the disease. That's why the
I gaze technology works for many people with ALS. It
tracks the eye movement to let users communicate more details
on that in about forty five seconds. And your third
and final useless fact about ALS, only about ten percent
of ALS cases are inherited. Yeah, roughly ninety percent happened

(02:35):
with no known family history. Those have been your three
useless facts about ALS. And before the Michael Strahan interview,
did you know that Chris Johnson was suffering from ALS disease?
Because I didn't. I didn't know. Maybe didn't. No, I
didn't know. I didn't. No, I didn't know. I didn't know.

(03:00):
I didn't know. Man, when most of us watch the
former NFL running back Chris Johnson's interview with Michael Strahan, yeah,
we saw a man battling ALS. But I just kept
asking one question, how the hell is he talking? And
it turns out he not talking the way we think
he's speaking with his eyes see. ALS attacks the nerve

(03:21):
cells that control voluntary muscles. Over time, most folks lose
the ability to walk, move their arms, hell, swallow, and speak.
But here's the incredible part. For a lot of people
with ALS, their eye muscles continue working long after almost
everything else as weakened, and science has realized something amazing.
If your eyes can still move you can still communicate.

(03:44):
So today, a small camera sits beneath the screen and
watches the user's eye movements. Instead of using a mouse
or a keyboard, they simply look at the letters or
the words or the phrases, hold the gaze for a moment,
and the computer knows which you selected. Then it speaks
it out loud for you. And now there's another layer.
See AI can recreate someone's own voice using recordings made

(04:08):
before they lost their ability to speak. So instead of
you hearing a robotic computer, families get to hear their
loved ones voice again. That's why when we were watching
a Michael Strahan interview, we were hearing Chris Johnson's voice.
He recorded his voice and saved it in a voice
bank after he got diagnosed with ALS. And think about that,
a child hearing their dad sound like their dad, right,

(04:31):
like a husband hearing his wife's voice again. No, technology
didn't cure ALS, but it gave thousands of people something
that they feared they'd lost forever, the ability to say
I love you. Sometimes the greatest breakthroughs ain't about making
people stronger, just about making sure that they're still heard.
And I didn't know, maybe you didn't either, I