A Washington, DC-based broadcast journalist and radio amateur, whose ability to speak was severely impaired a couple of years ago by a rare disorder, is adopting a technological solution to return his voice to the airwaves. ARRL member Jamie Dupree, NS3T, suffers from tongue protrusion dystonia, and he has limited speaking ability — he uses the barrel of a pen in his mouth to help better control his tongue. He had to drop off the broadcast airwaves and turn to print and online journalism to continue covering politics for Cox Media Group’s capitol bureau. But now, Dupree plans to leverage technology that will give him a fresh voice.

Dupree, 54, a contester and Potomac Valley Radio Club member, said in a blog post this week that his plight attracted the attention of his colleagues at Cox Media Group, who mounted an effort at the company’s Atlanta headquarters to find a high-tech solution to get him back on the broadcast airwaves.

“What they found was a Scottish company named CereProc, which agreed to sift through years of my archived audio and build a voice,” Dupree said. “The big news today is that it looks like that is going to work, and allow me to ‘talk’ on the radio again.” He’s calling it “Jamie Dupree 2.0.”

“Does the voice sound perfect? No. But it does sound like me,” Dupree continued. “When I type out some words, the text-to-speech program that I use spits them out in my new Jamie Dupree 2.0 voice.” Dupree concedes that the voice will sound robotic to some of his listeners, but “for the first time in 2 years, I will be back on the radio.”

Dupree said the plan is for him to once again feed news stories to Cox Media Group’s news-talk radio stations, putting him back on the air in hourly newscasts, reporting the news from Capitol Hill and Washington, DC.

“Jamie Dupree 2.0 is here — and I couldn’t be more excited about it!” he said. — Thanks to The Daily DX via Eric Rosenberg, W3DQ, PVRC