To try and condense: The software analyzes a chunk of sound, and breaks it into what we'd call "grains" today. Then, live audio is fed into the software, which compares the incoming signal with its previously analyzed grains, and using those grains, spits out as close an approximation as it can manage to the live signal.
14 years or so on, and this system, as near as I can tell, was never released. But recently I learned of some forays by Sony into creating software that could "deep fake" speech by taking an existing recording of someone talking, and using that to construct entirely new speech in the same voice.
My question/suggestion: could such a thing be done in the realm of Rack Extensions (or VST, I guess)? I'd think by now at the very least hardware has improved since 2006 to make this kind of processing more feasible. Is there such a thing already out there and I just don't know about it? Lectric Panda has done granular-based REs, might this be an interesting project to tackle? Or any other developer, for that matter? Such a thing would certainly have little competition at the moment...