Thanks to some help from the archives of Czechia public service broadcaster Česky Rozhlas, visitors to the Karel Čapek Memorial in Stará Hut can now hear the author’s voice.
A novelist, playwright, critic and journalist, Čapek (1890–1938) is best known in English for his science fiction works, including the play R.U.R., which introduced the word “robot” to English. In Czech, he is credited with helping to shape the modern use of Czech as a literary language.
Working with the limited recordings of Čapek found in the ČR archives, the Karel Čapek Memorial used an AI tool create narrations in Čapek’s voice for the site’s “Po stopách Karla Čapka” (In the footsteps of Karla Čapka) mobile app. The augmented reality app, developed by Yord Studios, guides visitors through the memorial’s grounds combining historical photographs with descriptions read by Čapek. Visitors are invited to use the app to compare the current site with how it was when Čapek and his wife, Olga Scheinpflugová, lived there.
The memorial’s director, Zdeněk Vacek, told Radio Prague International, that the project used all the available recordings of Čapek that ČR had. “This was relatively easy, since the recordings are less than 10 minutes in total. Čapek had a monotonous voice, he did not like to speak in public, much less in front of a microphone, which explains why there are so few recordings.”
Vacek said that these recordings were sufficient for the AI software to synthesize Čapek’s voice, however, “and we could have him read some of his own authentic statements or those of his friends about their time spent here.”
