This is the story of how AI gave Val his voice back.
5 minutes. One voice. One impossible restoration.
“I’m your huckleberry.”
If you know that line, you know the voice. Smooth, confident, unforgettable.
And then cancer took it away.
AI & The Art of the Possible — Exploring AI beyond the hype
Hosted by Chance Sassano
Episode 3 – The Huckleberry Moment Full Transcript
I’m Ya Huckleberry.
If you’ve seen Tombstone, you know that line.
Val Kilmer is Doc Holiday, 1993.
His voice was unforgettable, smooth, confident, dangerous, charming.
My friends and I quoted it all the time for everything. Silly stuff. That’s how iconic it was.
And then throat cancer took it. This is the story of how AI gave it back.
I’m Chance, and this is The Art of the Possible.
Episode three, The Huckleberry Moment
In 2015, Val Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer. The treatment saved his life, but took his voice. For many people, losing your voice is devastating.
For an actor, it’s losing your identity, your craft, that thing that made you, you, Val could still communicate through a voice box through writing, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t his voice. Imagine spending decades building a career on your voice, your presence, your delivery, and then it’s gone.
For years, that was his reality. Every word. Painful. Every conversation, exhausting. Interviews became struggles. His voice was gone, and with it a piece of himself.
Then in 2021, a company called Sonantic reached out. They specialized in AI generated voices. Not robotic. Text to speech, real human voices. They told Val something that seemed impossible. We think we can give you your voice back. Not an approximation, not an imitation. Your voice as it was.
They gathered hundreds of hours of recordings, movies, interviews, behind the scenes, footage, anything they could find. Then they trained an AI model on his voice. Not just copying sounds. The AI learned how Val spoke. His cadence, rhythm, the way he emphasized certain words, his warmth and emotion.
They weren’t creating a voice, they were recreating his voice. When Val heard it for the first time, he cried. It was him. Not a copy, not an approximation. The voice. He remembered the voice. His children remembered, not perfectly, not magically, but enough, enough that he could hear himself again enough that he could tell his own story in his own words.
In Val’s documentary, you hear it, the AI voice narrates parts of his story. And if you didn’t know, you’d think it was him because it is him just rebuilt. Top Gun Maverick. His character speaks with that same voice. Audiences heard Val Kilmer. The Val Kilmer, they remembered on screen again.
Here’s what gets me about all this.
We talk a lot about what AI can do, the tasks it automates, the jobs it might replace.
This isn’t AI replacing a human, it’s AI restoring one.
A voice isn’t just sound, it’s identity. It’s how we connect with the people we love. It’s how we are remembered.
Val didn’t lose his voice because technology made him obsolete. He lost it to cancer, to biology because life is unfair. AI gave him his voice back, but is not alone right now.
People with ALS are using this exact same technology. They record their voices early before the disease takes away their ability to speak, and when they can no longer talk, they’ll still be able to communicate in their own voice, not a computer voice. Their voice, the voice, their family knows.
That’s not about productivity. It’s about giving someone back a part of themselves they thought was gone forever. There’s a phrase, finding your voice. It means discovering who you are, what you stand for, and what you have to say. For most of us, that’s a metaphor, but for vow and for people with ALS and for anyone who’s lost the ability to speak, it’s literal.
And AI is helping them find their voice again, not by replacing what was lost, but by restoring it. I’m Ya Huckleberry, Val Kilmer said that line in 1993 and in 2021, thanks to ai, he can say it again, not the same way, but in a way that mattered. That’s the art of the possible. I’m Chance Sassano. Thanks for listening.
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Next week, AI can diagnose cancer or create deep fakes, build or destroy. Who gets to decide the double-edged sword moment on the art of the possible?
