This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Everybody's got an opinion on which Star Expedition is the best Star Trek. Say what you lot will about DS9 and Voyager, say what you will about the new movies — what fifty-fifty is red thing, anyway? — I imprinted on Helm Picard, watching TNG aslope my dad when I was a kid.

Each iteration of Star Trek had its own flaws and its own shining moments. They all tend to lean heavily on hand-waving sciencey stuff that makes bodily practicing scientists groan and pinch the bridge of their nose. And most of them had something else in common: Gene Roddenberry'due south wife voiced the figurer. Majel Barrett Roddenberry, often credited as Majel Barrett, voiced LCARS: the Library Computer Access/Retrieval System, or simply "the computer" — both in the Star Trek catechism and also on an episode of Family Guy. She too played the memorable, indomitable, sometimes insufferable Lwaxana Troi on TNG.

Fifty-fifty after Cistron Roddenberry had died, Majel carried on doing new voice acting for the Star Trek universe for near ii decades. She's been credited posthumously for work that was yet in post-product when she died in 2008. Now, subsequently her death, new pieces of content in the canon volition be able to deport on using her vox for the calculator. A tweet from the official @roddenberry account says that thanks to the magic of phoneme assay, Majel's voice could be in Star Trek: Discovery, or even "things like Siri."

Phonemes are the building blocks of language. More subtle than a syllable, phonemes are the sounds we combine to brand syllables and and so words. They're likewise the answer to using celebrity voices for open-concluded applications similar Siri. Certain, Majel Barrett Roddenberry or Sigourney Weaver or Morgan Freeman could record themselves saying a lot of dissimilar things. But the people that make Siri did it differently. They gave their voice histrion a huge list of natural language-twisting sentences that were rich in diverse combinations of phonemes. So they parsed out the phonemes so that they could apply the right combinatorics to brand Siri's vocalism realistic instead of robotic.

That's the idea behind using the vocalisation of the Computer in a new Star Trek. She said a lot of things during her career. With the ability of phoneme analysis, something similar Siri could use that vocal library to let you, too, feel the joy of having Lwaxana Troi as your co-pilot — whether or not she always said "stay in the rightmost lane, then merge onto New York road 9 toward Poughkeepsie" in her life.

Unlike Garmin's extremely disappointing non-Sean-Connery GPS voice pack, phoneme analysis would hateful that it was the bodily Majel Barrett — the actual computer's vocalism — responding to queries or giving directions. Can't you lot just hear her saying information technology in that sharpish, nasal tone, like she'due south pretty certain yous're going to be belatedly getting there even if you follow her directions, and that's all your fault?