Listen to JFK Make the Greatest Speech Never Made

From Tupac's barnstorming, beyond-the-grave performance at Coachella 2012 to Carlsberg founder J.C Jacobsen giving a TED talk to entrepreneurs more than a century after shuffling off this mortal coil, the marvels of modern tech mean death is no longer the end of the road for inspiring individuals.

Now, John F. Kennedy joins the ranks of those resurrected talents, in a world-first campaign from The Times which sees the 35th US president deliver the greatest speech never made - five decades later.

Created by Irish agency ROTHCO, JFK Unsilenced uses specialist AI technology to recreate JFK's famous 'Dallas Trade Mart Speech', which he was due to deliver in Dallas on the day he was assassinated, via a 22-minute video.

In order to put the President’s voice to the 22 minutes of words he had prepared to deliver, ROTHCO and tech company Cereproc built the monologue entirely out of data, using AI tech originally developed to help motor neurone disease sufferers 'preserve' their voices for the future.

Over a period of eight weeks, 831 speeches were sifted through to create a database of 116,777 phonetic sound units, split into 233,544 'half phones'. Segments were then smoothed together and finessed by sound engineers at post production company, Screen Scene.

Touching on topics such as freedom, power, wisdom and restraint, the speech itself feels incredibly timely, thanks to passages such as: ‘We in this country, in this generation, are - by destiny rather than choice - the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men”’

“When we delved into the words JFK had written for the Trade Mart speech, we found they were not only poignant for the time but strikingly relevant today," explains Alan Kelly, ECD, ROTHCO. "By bringing his voice back to life to deliver this speech, the message is even more powerful: 'We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.'”