{"id":789526,"date":"2026-10-02T10:30:24","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T10:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789526\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T10:30:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T10:30:24","slug":"ai-speech-clock-assesses-how-fast-youre-ageing-from-your-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789526\/","title":{"rendered":"AI \u2018speech clock\u2019 assesses how fast you\u2019re ageing from your voice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Older<\/p>\n

A new \u2018speech clock\u2019 analyses characteristics of a person\u2019s voice, including pitch, to assess how quickly they are ageing.Credit: Cheschhh\/Getty<\/p>\n

A \u2018speech clock\u2019 developed by scientists can predict how well a person is ageing<\/a> based on characteristics of their voice and how they talk. The clock draws on hundreds of vocal features, including pitch and talking speed, to estimate a person\u2019s age.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Inflammation clock\u2019 can reveal body\u2019s biological age<\/p>\n

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Using the clock, the scientists calculated a \u2018speech age gap\u2019 for individuals: the difference between a person\u2019s age as predicted by the speech clock and their chronological age. Large speech age gaps were strongly associated with cognitive issues in people, such as those that arise in dementia, suggesting that the new clock could be a useful tool for determining whether a person is growing older faster than expected.<\/p>\n

The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances1<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see a huge predictive value, just with a very simple four minutes of speech recordings,\u201d says neuroscientist Agust\u00edn Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez at Adolfo Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez University in Santiago, who is a co-author of the study.<\/p>\n

The speech clock could be a boon for tracking the ageing of people in low-resource regions, because it doesn\u2019t rely on expensive or invasive technologies, such as brain scans<\/a> and blood tests<\/a>, says Jed Meltzer, a cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in language at the University of Toronto in Canada and was not involved in the study. \u201cIt is a very impressive piece of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predicting age with speech<\/p>\n

Ageing clocks often use biological markers to assess how rapidly a person\u2019s body is declining. For instance, \u2018brain clocks\u2019<\/a> use signatures from neuroimaging to determine whether an individual\u2019s brain is ageing faster than their chronological age suggests. And \u2018epigenetic clocks\u2019 look at the patterns of methyl tags on a person\u2019s DNA<\/a> to estimate their biological age. But so far, researchers hadn\u2019t developed a clock based on speech. Such a tool could offer a useful window into the ageing process because speaking involves a \u201chuge amount of brain work\u201d, Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez says.<\/p>\n

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How quickly are you ageing? What molecular \u2018clocks\u2019 can tell you about your health<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

To create their clock, Ib\u00e1\u00f1ez and his colleagues recorded 2,928 Spanish speakers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru while they completed various speech tasks. The group was a mixture of healthy individuals and people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer\u2019s disease or other forms of dementia. The researchers used machine-learning algorithms to extract more than 700 speech characteristics that can change with ageing and dementia, such as pitch and vocabulary range, from the audio recordings. They then used these data to train their speech-clock model to predict each study participant\u2019s age.<\/p>\n

Overall, the speech clock could distinguish between healthy individuals and those with some form of cognitive impairment. The clock, for instance, categorized the speech of people with cognitive issues as being older than would be expected for their chronological age. Healthy people were generally assessed as having speech that matched their chronological age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new \u2018speech clock\u2019 analyses characteristics of a person\u2019s voice, including pitch, to assess how quickly they are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[5079,6112,59,102,4230,4231,367,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-789526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-ageing","tag-computer-science","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-neuroscience","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}