Rebecca Gayheart and her daughters are still "in a state of shock" following Eric Dane's death.

The 54-year-old actress' husband died on 19 February, 10 months after he revealed he had been diagnosed with the degenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and she is thankful for all the people who have rallied around her family - including her and Eric's kids Billie, 15, and 14-year-old Georgia - over the last few weeks.

She told Variety: "I just want to thank everybody for being so kind to us during the last couple of years. It's been challenging and meaningful, and people are kind.

"I'm having trouble receiving all of the support and love coming at me from every which way because of Eric and the [entertainment] community that's so generous with their time.

"They've been holding me and the girls up the last two weeks, and I don't think they're going anywhere. I think they're in it for the long haul. Hollywood gets a bad rap. That kind of makes me mad, because we have a lovely community of people, and I'm so grateful for them."

In the final weeks of his life, Eric took part in an AI voice restoration project with ElevenLabs, which helped restore his ability to communicate via a synthetic voice created using past recordings of his own speech and he was "visibly emotional" when he was presented with what the company had managed to achieve.

Rebecca said: "[Eric] was really excited about it, because he was losing his voice, and it was becoming more difficult for him to communicate each and every day. So it became sort of urgent.

"He was waiting anxiously to hear it, and when we got it from ElevenLabs it was a really big moment. It was a powerful moment. We played it, and Eric became visibly emotional.

"And when I heard it, I cried. I think everyone in the room did."

A few days after Eric got the ElevenLabs voice system, the couple played it for their daughters and the family's only disappointment is that the Euphoria star didn't get the time to use it to its full potential.

Rebecca said: "They were like, that's not a recording. That's your voice. That's you. So it was spot on. He just had this way of speaking, and they captured it so beautifully.

"[Our daughters] signed off on it, and we were thrilled to have it because we knew what was coming down the pike.

"We were all really struggling with the voice loss that he was already experiencing. Knowing we had that in our back pocket, just felt really good. I'm sad, and I know Eric is too, that we didn't ever get to really use it."

ElevenLabs has pledged to provide a lifetime software licenses and support services for free to one million people who suffer from neurological terminal diseases such as ALS, and Rebecca knows Eric would be pleased.

She said: "What I do know is that he would want as many people as possible to have access [to voice restoration technology].

"Your voice is such a big part of your craft and you're a storyteller. He really understood how meaningful having the voice was. As his speech started to decrease, his ability to speak went away. He did lose a certain part of himself. He wasn't able to express things in his own very special way.

"So he really understood how meaningful it was and the extraordinary honour giving someone back their voice and what that would feel like for others, and he wanted to make sure that he did everything he could do to make that happen.

"11 Voices is a great movement, and I know he's happy that this is getting done. He could not be happier that a million people will get their voices back -- that I know."