DECtalk Engineer Continues Research

Digital Equipment Corporation's Tony Vitale has ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which most of us know as Lou Gehrig's Disease. It is a degenerative disease that affects the central nervous system, giving its victims an average life expectancy of one-to-five years.

Vitale was diagnosed in July 1993. Until then he was living a vigorous, active life: running four miles a day, lifting weights at night, playing a lot of tennis. Today, little more than two years later, he cannot walk. He is in a wheelchair.

Vitale works for Digital's Assistive Technology Group. He rejected an option to stop working and receive a long-term disability pension. He works at the office two days a week and at home the other three.

For the last 24 years, Vitale has been developing speech synthesizer technology, which he may become dependent upon in order to communicate, as his disease takes its course.

He is currently in the process of teaching computers to speak not only English, but German, French, Spanish and some Japanese. "I am the teacher, the computer is the student", said Vitale.

Vitale is fluent in French, German, Polish, Italian and Swahili; he has written two books about Swahili. And now, while continuing to publish technical papers on text-to-speech synthesis, he is writing a book about his life's experiences.

Always driven by adventure, Vitale has trekked through East Africa, spent time in the Peace Corps in Kenya, and worked with the U.S. Government in Somalia and Zaire. He also worked with the U.S. Information Agency in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Morocco and Hungry, and taught under a senior Fulbright professorship in Tanzania and Poland.

Many years ago, he and his wife Jeanine sat on the floor of an apartment in Tanzania eating dessert while bullets screamed overhead, smashing through windows across the street. Vitale promised her that the next assignment would be "someplace peaceful." The next assignment turned out to be Poland during a state of unrest.

He spent one evening with Cambridge University Professor Stephen Hawking, the noted physicist who also has ALS, and who uses DECtalk to communicate. When the subject of winning the lottery came up in conversation, Vitale said he would spend the rest of his life drinking rum on a beautiful island in the Caribbean.

"No you wouldn't," said Hawking. "You'd keep working on speech, just as I've kept working on theoretical physics, because we owe it to mankind, and it's a much more useful endeavor than the one you just spoke about".

"Hawking was right," says Vitale. "I'm much happier now than I used to be," he says. "I no longer sweat the small stuff. The most important things are family, friends and doing something useful. In that order".