Voice assistants, phones and other objects: sound is more and more a part of our lives. In Paris, IRCAM, the acoustic / music research and coordination institute, is a laboratory for innovation in the field of sound. To commercialize these innovations, IRCAM has for a few months created la filiale Amplify, responsible for liaising between the institute and potential clients. IRCAM Amplify Managing Director Nathalie Birocheau answers questions from France Bleu Paris.
Do you work in particular on artificial intelligence, artificial voices, which you are trying to make less “mechanical”? Could you put some emotion in our voice assistants for example?
It is true that voice assistants and moreover objects in general will increasingly become objects animated with voices. So what is our know-how in there? It is rather to look for characteristics, to go and work on the voices. For example, making a voice as expressive as possible in a given context. It is true that when leaving we tend to want to make the voices of our objects resemble human voices as much as possible. After that asks questions: is that really the best goal to achieve? Or ultimately what we want is for the interaction to be as rich as possible, but not necessarily with a human voice?
Is there also an experience that should emerge as part of the opening of the Children’s Philharmonic?
We are developing a project for one of the workshops of the Children’s Philharmonic which should soon open, so that children can learn to put themselves in the shoes of a conductor. The child will be able to perform the conductor’s gestures and the desks will come alive according to these gestures. He has nothing in hand, it is only with cameras, so behind there are technologies that are quite powerful.
What consequences has the health crisis had on your business? Is the demand for “sound experiences” increasing?
It is true that with this crisis, we must learn to live at a distance, our consumption patterns are changing, whether it is to buy things, to consume music, or to interact with other human beings. And so yes we have questions like how to amplify a remote experience with sound? How to amplify a remote customer relationship using sound? This is where we come in and indeed we have chances of being at the heart of a lot of opportunities thanks to this crisis, but we still hope that it will end very very quickly.
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