Apple broke ground in advertising last year with “The Greatest,” a joyful film representing people with disabilities in their everyday lives. Now it followed up that effort with a childhood fable focused on speech accessibility.
The tech brand released “The Lost Voice,” directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi and coinciding with International Day of Persons With Disabilities Dec. 3. The film unfolds as a narrated children’s story, with magical creatures and a journey through beautiful landscapes.
The tale begins when a young girl meets a rabbit-like creature with white and pink fur. Curiously, she asks him, “Why are you so quiet?” and offers to help the animal find his voice.
The pair begin an epic search for his voice, traveling through forests, deserts, mountains and beaches and meeting friendly characters along the way, including a frog, owl and turnip. They discern that despite being quiet, the creature has “so much to say.”
At the end, it is revealed that the narrator is a dad with speech loss who is reading a bedtime story to his child using Apple’s latest accessibility feature, Personal Voice.
The brand introduced Personal Voice on iOS 17 earlier this year. The feature uses secure on-device machine learning to sample and re-create people’s voices, helping those who lose their ability to speak due to conditions such as muscular dystrophy or motor neurone disease.
The ad also showcases another new accessibility feature, Live Speech, which allows users to type what they want to say on an Apple device and have it be spoken out loud during calls or in-person conversations.
Real impact
As with award-winning campaign “The Greatest,” Apple’s goal for “The Lost Voice” is to show the impact of its accessibility features on the lives of users.
While “The Greatest” depicted a wider range of disabilities, the new ad shines a personal light on speech loss, drawing on people’s concerns over missing out on moments with loved ones due to the inability to speak.
The narrator and actor who plays the father in “The Lost Voice” is a real user of Personal Voice: Dr. Tristram Ingham, a physician, associate professor of epidemiology and a disability advocate from Wellington, New Zealand. Ingham has facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, which causes progressive muscle degeneration and can lead to speech loss.
To create the narration, Ingham used his own Personal Voice on the iPhone, recording 150 prompt phrases that were then processed to read out the lines of the story.
The film’s score—an avant-garde track called “Yodeler” by husband-wife duo X Carbon—was also created out of human voice samples.
Waititi—known for movies such as Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Love and Thunder—shot the ad in his native New Zealand. Besides the animated characters and puppets, the human cast are all from the country, as well.
Along with the film, Apple turned the book that the dad reads from into a real storybook, which will be available as a free download on ebook platform Apple Books starting Nov. 30.
The goal of the book and film is to raise awareness but also to help others process speech loss with their families and young children.
