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 completely robbed him of it.
Gayheart, 54, spoke to Variety about her late husband’s collaboration with AI 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 his death, was losing the ability to speak as the disease progressed.
“He was really excited, because he was losing his voice and it was getting harder and harder for him 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 one Gayheart won’t forget.
“He was looking forward to hearing it, and when we received it from ElevenLabs, it was a really big moment. It was a powerful moment,” she said.
“We played it and Eric got visibly emotional. And when I heard it, I cried. I think everyone in the room did.”
She added that Dane wanted to use this experience to advocate more broadly for ALS awareness and the broader movement around voice restoration technology.
“For a million people to be able to have a voice and be able to communicate with their children or their loved ones or their caregivers or their doctors or in their jobs, that’s a really huge movement,” she said.
“He wanted to stand up for love and the movement and so I’m here to do it for him.”
Gayheart and Dane, best known for his roles in Grey’s Anatomy And Euphoriamet in 2003 and married the following year.
They separated in 2018 but remained close and Gayheart became one of her primary 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.
