A radio broadcast by pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart has been restored by a new AI tool.
Earhart gave the talk, entitled ‘A Woman’s Place in Science’, in 1935.
The broadcast has now been restored by speech restoration tool Diffio AI.
Diffio founder Nathan Harmon published extracts from the original recording and the restored version on the company’s blog.
He said Diffio “removes the background noise and hiss while keeping the same voice and the same words", and the original audio can be kept as a reference.
In the restored recording, Earhart can be heard saying that “the lives of women” have been more affected by advances in science than anyone else’s.
“It is in the home that the applications of scientific achievement have perhaps been most far-reaching,” she says.
Born in Kansas in 1897, Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane.
In 1937, Earhart began an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe, accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan and flying in a Lockheed Electra plane.
She was last heard from on 2 July 1937, communicating with the US Coast Guard ship Itasca while flying across the Pacific Ocean from Lae in Papua New Guinea to Howland Island, before the plane disappeared.
Most historians agree that Earhart and Noonan probably died after their plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. However, other theories that have been put forward include the two being captured by Japanese forces.
In October 2026, a team from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University carried out an exhibition to Nikumaroro Island, approximately 400 miles south of Howland Island, to investigate a reported object submerged in a lagoon that may have been the wreckage of Earhart’s plane. The investigation found that the object was submerged trees and debris.
