Consortium

The project will leverage a substantial skill set by the partners, which include Orange, a leading telecommunication provider with strong research skills on speech processing, IRCAM, a research lab with a strong expertise in neural speech synthesis and voice conversion and three academic labs: IRISA with expertise in expressive text-to-speech, LIA with a strong expertise in speaker analysis and anonymization, and LPP, an internationally recognized laboratory, which holds a LABEX (Empirical Fundations of Linguistics), and provides the strong skills needed in phonetics. The partners have a record of successful collaborations, via previous ANR projects such as VoxCrim (2017-2021), TheVoice (2017-2021) and VoicePersonae (2019–2024).

IRCAM - Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique

The Sound Analysis and Synthesis (AS) team of the Sciences and Technologies of Music and Sound laboratory (STMS, UMR 9912, IRCAM - CNRS - Sorbonne University) is specialized in the modeling and transformation of sounds, in particular of the spoken voice. The AS team will bring to the project its know-how and skills in neural generative modeling of speech signals for text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion. The AS team coordinates many research projects in the field of voice, such as the ANR projects VIVOS, ChaNTeR, TheVoice (2017-2021), ARS (2019-2023), EXOVOICES (2022-2026), BRUEL (2022-2026), and DeTOX (2023-2025). The AS team has developed many tools for audio professionals (e.g., the ircamTOOLS TRaX real-time voice transformation plugin commercialized by the company Flux), making it a major player in the transfer of research results into industrial applications. The AS team recently contributed to the production of Dalida’s vocal deep fake for Thierry Ardisson’s show "L’Hôtel du Temps".

IRCAM participants: Nicolas Obin, Axel Roebel

IRISA - Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires

IRISA is one of the largest research French laboratory in Computer Science and Information Technologies. The laboratory counts 850 people including 700 scientists split up into 40 research teams in 7 departments. The Expression team - from the department Signal, Image, Language - focuses on studying human language data conveyed by different media: gesture, speech and text. In particular, the team is specialized in Natural Language Processing and Speech Processing. It has participated to many collaborative research project such as ANR Phorevox (2012-2014), ANR SynPaFlex (2015-2019), H2020 NADINE (2018-2021), ANR TextToKids (2019-2023), ANR SignToKids (2023-2026).

IRISA participants: Damien Lolive, Vincent Barreaud

LIA - Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon

LIA is a public research laboratory in computer science affiliated to Avignon Université and comprising 80 scientists. Historically, it has focused and still focuses on speech and language technologies. It often participates in international evaluation campaigns, showing its mastering of such technologies by reaching top rankings. The team has coordinated or participated in several national and European projects (e.g., ANR VoxCrim, ANR TheVoice, ANR Rugbi, ANR RoboVox, ANR-JST VoicePersonae, ANR DEEP-PRIVACY, H2020 SELMA) and develops close partnerships with industry.

LIA participants: Corinne Fredouille, Mickaël Rouvier, Yannick Estève, Benjamin O'Brien + Jean-François Bonastre (INRIA)

LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie

LPP (laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology) is one the French historic laboratories in experimental phonetics that were first developed in Sorbonne University. It articulates between linguistics, medical and computer sciences with projects such as ANR VoxCrim (2018-2022), ANR DIPVAR (2022-2025), ANR Vocalise (2022-2026), FNS ChaSpeePro (2021-2025), etc.

LPP participants: Cédric Gendrot, Nicolas Audibert

Orange Innovation

Orange Innovation is an entity with 720 researchers dedicated to exploring technological breakthroughs, new uses and innovative business models, participates with members of the SHIVA (SpeecH understanding And Voice Analysis) research program.

Orange participants: Olivier Le Blouch (project coordinator), Nicolas Gengembre