Taika Waititi Directs Apple's Magical Storybook Tale of a Furry Friend's Search for 'The Lost Voice'

Created in-house by Apple MARCOM and launched ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (December 3rd) this latest film promotes accessibility on Apple devices, focusing on a new feature introduced in iOS17 called Personal Voice.

Titled 'The Lost Voice', the spot tells the tale of a young girl and her fantastical floppy-eared friend, as they search high and low for his missing voice, before revealing a uniquely personal moment between a father and a daughter. The film is narrated entirely by the father, Dr. Tristram Ingham, who is an associate professor of epidemiology and a disability advocate from Wellington, New Zealand. He has facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), which causes progressive muscle degeneration that can ultimately lead to an inability to speak. The Personal Voice technology he uses to narrate the ad enables Dr. Ingham to preserve and continue to use his own voice well into the future.

For the shoot, Apple enlisted Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi ('Jojo Rabbit', 'Thor: Love and Thunder', 'What We Do In The Shadows') and shot in his native New Zealand. The production captures the beautiful natural landscapes of the country and stars an assortment of furry, feathered and froggy puppets that add to its dreamlike, storybook feel.

The film showcases how your voice can be an important part of what makes you, you - from speaking with loved ones to reading a bedtime story. Yet millions of people around the world are at risk of losing their ability to speak due to a wide range of conditions such as muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known internationally as motor neurone disease (MND).

Personal Voice uses secure, on-device machine learning to sample and recreate your own voice, which means if you ever subsequently lose the ability to speak, you can continue to communicate through your iPhone, iPad or Mac (using another new feature called Live Speech) - and still sound like you.

To craft the narration for this film, Dr. Ingham used his own Personal Voice, which involved recording 150 prompt phrases to process the Personal Voice. The result is a voiceover which showcases a realistic use of the software.

The score features an avant-garde track by husband-wife duo X Carbon, called 'Yodeler'. Notably, it is also created almost entirely out of human voice samples. The band revisited its original track for the film, with new sections and layers to match the film’s whimsical tone. The book which features at the end of the film was made into a real storybook and ebook featuring the characters in the film. It is available as a free download on Apple Books starting November 30th.