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 robbed him of it completely.
Gayheart, 54, spoke Black about her late husband’s work with the AI company ElevenLabs in the weeks before his death on February 19 at the age of 53.
Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just ten months before he died, Dane had lost his ability to speak as the disease progressed.
“He was really excited about it because he was losing his voice and it was getting harder for him to communicate every day. So it became kind of urgent,” Gayheart recalled.
ElevenLabs’ Impact Program, which provides free licenses to people with accessibility needs, uses previous recordings to create a synthetic voice for people in Danes’ situation.
The moment they heard the finished result together was something Gayheart will never forget.
“He was anxiously waiting to hear it, and when we got 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 Danes had wanted to use the experience to advocate more widely for ALS awareness and the wider movement around voice restoration technology.
“For a million people to have a voice to be able to communicate with their children or their loved ones or their caretakers or their doctors or in their jobs, this is a really huge movement,” she said.
“He wanted to advocate for love and for the movement, and so I’m there to do this 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, with Gayheart becoming one of his primary caregivers during his 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 his daughters in his final days.
