Rebecca Gayheart has revealed that Eric Dane spent some of his final weeks working on an urgent personal project, using artificial intelligence to restore his voice before ALS took it away completely.
Gayheart, 54, spoke with Variety about her late husband’s collaboration with the artificial intelligence company ElevenLabs in the weeks before his death on February 19 at the age of 53.
Dane, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just ten months before he died, had been losing his ability to speak as the disease progressed.
“He was very emotional because he was losing his voice and it was getting harder and harder to communicate every day. So it became urgent,” Gayheart recalled.
ElevenLabs’ Impact program, which provides free licenses to people with accessibility needs, uses past recordings to create a synthetic voice for people in Dane’s situation.
The moment they heard the final result together was something Gayheart will never forget.
“I was eagerly waiting to hear it, and when we received it from ElevenLabs it was a great moment. It was a powerful moment,” he said.
“We played it and Eric got visibly moved. And when I heard it, I cried. I think everyone in the room did.”
He added that Dane had wanted to use the experience to advocate more broadly for ALS awareness and the broader movement around voice restoration technology.
“For a million people to have a voice and be able to communicate with their children, their loved ones, their caregivers, their doctors or at work, this is a really huge movement,” he said.
“He wanted to stand up for love and movement and that’s why I’m there to do this for him.”
Gayheart and Dane, best known for his roles in Grey’s Anatomy and EuphoriaThey met in 2003 and married the following year.
They separated in 2018, but remained close and Gayheart became one of her main caregivers during her illness.
The couple share two daughters, Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14. Dane’s family confirmed his death in a statement to PEOPLEdescribing him as a “passionate advocate for awareness and research” who was surrounded by friends, his wife and daughters in his final days.
