Ever since she was a small child, Samantha Grimaldo has had to carry her voice with her.

Grimaldo was born with a rare disorder, Perisylvian syndrome, which means that though she's physically capable in many ways, she's never been able to speak. Instead, she's used a device to speak. She types in what she wants to say, and the device says those words out loud. Her mother, Ruane Grimaldo, says that when Samantha was very young, the voice she used came in a heavy gray box.

"She used to have to carry this device around that was at least 4 or 5 pounds," Ruane says, "and she was only, like, 70 pounds herself. The poor thing had to carry this back and forth to school every day on the bus." It was miserable having to lug her voice around that way — a clunky box sitting on the seat next to her.

Today, fortunately, Samantha's voice takes up much less space. She types into a special program on an iPhone or iPad, and a synthesized voice in the program says the words aloud. The voice, one of several types on the market, is called "Heather." That's a nice enough name — easygoing and accessible — but Grimaldo doesn't like to use the voice if she can help it.

~snip~

It's not just that the voice is artificial and disjointed. It sounds, Samantha says, "older." Samantha is only 17, and the sound of the voice — deep, methodical, mature — doesn't exactly align with her sense of herself. Like any teenager, she feels self-conscious about it.

"I don't want (people to) hear," she says.

~snip~

Rupal Patel, a speech scientist at Northeastern University, estimates that between 50 and 60 percent of the people who use synthetic voices use the same one — the Perfect Paul voice. If you have ever heard Stephen Hawking speak, or listened to the weather radio, you have heard the voice of Perfect Paul.

~snip~

...it was through confronting the clear limits of Perfect Paul that speech scientist Patel came to the conclusion that people like Samantha Grimaldo needed new options.

~snip~