L'observatoire Data & Créativité by iligo | The Real Voice of Louis XIV

The Real Voice of Louis XIV

To promote the final series of « Versailles, » a steamy drama about Louis XIV, French broadcaster Canal+ decided to promote the series with the help with the Sun King himself, by recreating his real voice and converting it into a chatbot

In order to do so a group of historians and scientists worked for months on end, compiling data about the king
The data was transformed into a synthetic voice
The synthetic voice, together with Google’s artificial intelligence, allowed people to « converse » with the King via a bot

Louis XIV was heavily monitored throughout his life and every little detail about him was written down in his medical journal. This contained descriptions of everything from the structure of his skull, to the shape of his vocal cords and lungs and even a mouth operation that forever changed his speech
The team drew data from these medical records, and the data was then run through a voice simulation program and synthetic speech experts were able to recreate his voice

The Sun King was “invited” to the country’s biggest talk shows, where he thanks to over 500 programmed answers expressed his opinion on a number of topics, including the CANAL+ series about his life
Launched in June 2018, the detailed results of this campaign remain unknown