In 1993, the then minister of Defense of the Government of César Gaviria, Rafael Pardo Rueda, suffered an accident that seriously committed his health, had a breakdown of the ascending aorta. It was operated of emergencies, but required medical treatment and monitoring.
Already in 2018 he had another medical event that drastically changed his life, this time the abdominal aorta exploded, he was already in a coma, his family did not give him much hope of life. Despite the bad forecasts, Pardo Rueda recovered, but he had a sequel: he lost his speech.
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Today, at 71, Rafael Pardo Rueda launched the podcast The Voice of Pardowhich as explained to El Colombiano the journalist Daniel Samper Ospina and rector of the digital school, was an initiative of the former minister himself: “This was a restlessness that Rafael himself hadHe wanted to write his stories and have a digital format to tell them, how his life was and the country that had to live on him and the one who witnessed. ”
At the beginning it was thought that he wrote the scripts and a woman read them, “but someone told him what we did in the digital school, they arrived at school, they told us the idea and we came rather A team and “with him we develop a program to try to faithfully recreate the voice of Pardo.”
How did Rafael Pardo give voice again?
The team – integrated by 8 people – began working on a program that would feed on so many hours of recordings by Rafael Pardo Rueda, of many moments of his life, of different years and with that they managed to make an average of his voice to which he was taught cadences, intonations and others.
This was not one day work, but of many hours that were invested, because the AI also made corrections to achieve a very approximate voice of the one known to the former minister.
It was a project that developed the entire team involved in the project.
More details of the Pardo Voice Podcast
Samper Ospina tells us that Rafael Pardo was fully involved in the project: “He had the support of a journalist, but he wrote the librettos and intervened in all instances of the idea, not only of how many video-podcast we were going to do, but in the discussions of when to launch it and on what platforms and others.”
At the beginning of Pódcast is heard The voice today of Rafael Pardo that says: “I am Rafael Pardo, many will ask if I died or disappeared, but none of that happened, because of a vascular stroke I practically lost speech …”, then comes the voice already adjusted with the “… but not my voice that is recreated by artificial intelligence.”
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Using that voice today was a debate on the team, says Samper Ospina, “that was a debate because the idea is that he felt comfortable, but he himself suggested and understood that it could be a good idea to show the metamorphosis of his own voice showing in that beginning his voice today.”
So for that, the first chapter – which is already on the air on platforms – contextualizes the audience, tells everything that happened with a story of his family, his wife, his daughters, the doctors and how they lived everything that happened to him in medical terms, “it is very exciting, sentimental, it is a great love story and in terms of medicine is exciting which happened to Rafael Pardo, ”says Daniel.
This is not the only project of the digital school, “we are doing many projects with this same idea of recovering voices from the past, our great goal is to demonstrate that AI can be used for noble, beneficial, journalistic and ethical purposes, that last is something very important.”
In addition to the Voice of Pardo, the Roberto Pombo Podcast video also produces in the digital school, My questions or that of Menopaúsic and whatby María Elvira Samper and Yolanda Ruiz and several similar products come.
The Voice of Pardo will have 10 episodes that will have issues such as its early years, the relationship with power (work with three presidents), the persecution of Pablo Escobar, what it is like to do political campaigns in Colombia, the peace processes of which he has witnessed, and his passions (Independent Santa Fe and music).
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