how is stephen hawking able to talk

Stephen Hawking was able to talk by using a speech-generating computer system that turned his selections into spoken words.

How it worked

• A sensor on his glasses detected tiny movements in his cheek muscle.

• A cursor scanned across letters and words on the screen, and he selected what he wanted by twitching his cheek.

• The system used predictive text to speed things up, helping him type much faster.

• After the sentence was built, a speech synthesizer spoke it aloud in his signature robotic voice.

Simple version

Think of it like this: he couldn’t speak with his voice, so he used a computer that let him “type” with a small cheek movement, then converted that text into speech.

Extra note

Earlier versions of his communication setup were slower, but later software improvements made it much more practical for everyday conversation.