Eli Lane, a New York drama student who grew up in Walsall, is used to receiving jokes about his Black Country accent and will sometimes even adopt a new voice for auditions.

However, for Daniel Challis, a fellow Midlander, Lane’s voice is exactly what he wants to hear.

Challis, a student from Aldridge, near Walsall, has cerebral palsy and has used a communication device to speak since he was nine. But now he is finally able to sound like his family after Lane recorded 3,500 words for him to use as part of a new automated voice.

Challis, 20, first posted on social media in 2022 seeking people with his family’s local accent, to help him replace the “robotic” voice he had used since he was a child. He uses a communication device by tracing words with his eye movements.

Ten people answered Challis’s call, submitting a recording of themselves reading the first page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and it was Lane’s voice that Challis chose.

“It wasn’t an acting job at all,” Lane, 21, said. “It was just something that felt like a really nice thing to be part of. I wanted to help in some way. Money was never on the cards, I didn’t want it.”

The New York Conservatory, where Lane studies, made one of its recording studios available to him and he would record for a couple of hours in between classes and on days off for three weeks.

Prompted by speech-synthesis software, Lane read out computer-generated sentences to cover the most commonly used words.

He then recorded about 30 words and phrases chosen by Challis, such as his family members’ names, the Welsh caravan site where they go on holiday, and Gryffindor, his favourite Harry Potter house.

Although the two students are yet to meet, Challis sent a message to Lane saying his new voice was “fantastic, and made him really happy to share it with his family”.

On hearing the message, Lane said: “I was in bits, I’ll be honest, when I first heard it and it was really emotional. I’ve never met Dan, I’d love to.

“It was a really beautiful message and as soon as I finished the call I just burst into a pile of tears.

“It’s surreal hearing it, because it does sound like me, the technology is incredible. I’m just glad that voice is now his, it’s no longer just mine.”

Lane called for more people to get involved in similar projects.

“Dan’s not the only kid with a regional accent who needs a voice, who wants a voice,” he said. “And there are plenty of people who can give that, to improve their life in some way.”

Maizie Morgan, the assistive technology technician at National Star, said Challis’s was her third voice donor project, out of at least ten facilitated by the college. National Star offers learning opportunities for young people with disabilities.

“It’s amazing, it’s just so nice to work behind the scenes,” she said. “When it’s all done you can give it to the student and it’s so rewarding, the expression on their face, what they say, how it makes them feel. It just makes the whole project so worth it.”

Morgan said that although communication devices have slightly more variation in banked voices than ten years ago, they are still generic “sat nav voices” compared to the “bespoke” ones offered by the projects.

“No one else in the entire world will have that voice that belongs to that student,” she said, “because that donor has recorded it specifically for them.”

The process varied greatly between students but most were driven by sounding more like their family, including three who chose their siblings to record their new voice.

Some students, who had lost their voices in accidents, were seeking a similar sound to their old voices.

National Star is working on a voice for a young woman, 21, from Wales, and another for a man from Birmingham who wants to speak in his own voice at his wedding.

The project’s budgets, typically a few thousand pounds, rely on grants and donations to pay voiceover artists and provide them with recording equipment, although Lane volunteered his time to record Challis’s voice.

Challis was inspired to change his accent by the comedian Lee Ridley, who changed the voice on his communication device from one that sounded like “the shipping forecast on Radio 4” to a Geordie accent.