Major General Norman B. Edwards — Interactive Biography
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Major General Norman B. Edwards — Interactive Biography
Role: Developer, Archivist Technologies: ElevenLabs Conversational AI, ElevenLabs Voice Cloning, Hugging Face Spaces Focus Areas: Digital Preservation, Longevity AI, Voice AI, Family History
Project Overview
An interactive biography of Major General Norman B. Edwards — a WWII veteran and family member — built by digitizing memoir audio cassettes and using ElevenLabs’ voice cloning and Conversational AI to create a living, speakable archive.
Rather than a static document, the result is an interactive experience: visitors can have a conversation with a voice model trained on the actual recordings, asking questions and hearing answers in Norman’s own voice drawn from his memoir.
Why This Project
The goal wasn’t novelty — it was preservation with presence. Digitized recordings and scanned documents are archives. This is a way to make history feel alive and accessible to family members who never met him, or who want to hear him tell his own story again.
This project is part of a broader interest in Longevity AI — using AI not to replace human connection but to extend it: preserving memories of loved ones while they’re still alive, or reconstructing legacies from what remains.
Technical Approach
- Digitized memoir audio cassettes to create a source corpus
- Cloned Norman’s voice using ElevenLabs Voice Cloning from the recordings
- Built a conversational agent using ElevenLabs Conversational AI (Beta), grounded in memoir content
- Deployed as an interactive Hugging Face Space accessible to family and the public
Related Project
A companion experience — the Dr. James Hollis Dialogue Experience — applies the same approach to a public figure, creating an AI interlocutor based on published works and lectures exploring Jungian psychology.