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Very interesting question! Why aren’t we simply satisfied with the content of the speech, the script and its message?

Why do we require the voice to be “as historically accurate as possible”? What’s next, a replicated 3D video of the event that we can experience as if it’s happening in front of us? To what end?

Why isn’t the script and the content of the speech enough to satisfy our inquiring minds?

Clearly not you, but then maybe this raises uncomfortable questions for you in other areas, as surely as an academic you have an interest (responsibility?) in cultivating an interest in your specialism? This is clearly one way to do it, even if it doesn't appeal to you.

I don't speak French, je regrette de dire. Is there a translation I can read or listen to?

Thank you for this brilliant, important work.

This is amazing and definitely an “event”, so congrats on that.

Would you say that IA could change the way you work, and maybe how we think about history? We could recreate a lot of other historic moments in the future, maybe from even more fragmented informations.

Also, a few years ago, someone from your team contacted me to try an AI video search engine I created. I now have a new version, would you be willing to talk to see if it could be useful to you? I’m in Paris by the way.

Thanks!

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Uh just watch the video explainer.. it’s literally a few minutes

Why not? This is way better than someone reading his speech. I could do that myself on Wikipedia.

This was an incredible video, thank you for creating it.

What was it like the first time you heard the recording?

Historical exploration? Artistic facsimile of an as-close-to-real event? Evolution of technology? Why not? Shirley🛫the why is explained in the post above or deeper if you’re genuinely interested.

Seems like an insurmountable task. Did you ever consider giving up?

I would like the answer as well!

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time

Yay to go! What a great use of modern technology to solve mysteries of the past

I don't know if your reply is a criticism on my comment, so maybe I was not exact enough about the differences of traditional/simplified Chinese vs. Kanji. You can correct me, if I am wrong, as my knowledge of Chinese is (extremely) limited, but I have been several times to Japan. So this is bascially my (limited) knowledge from about 12 years ago.

Concerning the Chinese characters vs. Japanese Kanji: There is traditional and simplified Chinese, yes. The traditional Chinese had several reforms, the major ones about 210BC and starting from 1949 another one (leading to the simplifed Chinese being formely adapter in 1964 afaik). However in between these major dates, obviously a bunch of other quite minor adaptations happened (as in every language and writing) - however it is mostly static. The reforms tried to simplify writing, but there are some runnning gags nowadays, like 'the simplified love lacks the heart'...

There are traditional Kanji and (after WW2 some modifications - leading to the 'shinjitai'?) modern Kanji. However, the set of trad. Kanji are derived from roughly the 5th century AD (mainly due to Buddhist texts and trade, as Japan had no writing system) and there are additional characters Japanese-only kanji that form the so-called 'kukoji'. Those kanji don't have an on'yomi (Chinese) spelling, as they are not 'from China' - but obviously kun'yomi (Japanese spelling). An example is 込 ...

But as a fun twist of history, some Japanese kanji were even absorbed back into traditional Chinese so they 'gained' an on'yomi spelling!

But it does not end here - some kanji even have a different on'yomi as you would expect from their traditional Chinese counterpart, mainly due to the fact that they are not derived from Mandarin, but some other dialects. Some are some exapmles of different meanings, the most commonly known being 手纸/手紙 (Shouzhi? Sorry for buthering this) meaning 'toilet paper' in Chinese and 手紙 (tegami) meaning 'letter' in Japanese.

So yes, Kanji are to the vast majority traditional Chinese characters, but with some slight twist.

As a native french speaker I can say that the speech they recreated is much much faithful to De Gaulle's actual way to speak than the actors who played him.

De Gaulle had a very special way to talk, he talked extremely slowly exagerating the pronunciation of every word and making long pauses. I never heard an actor actually doing him perfectly, in Le Monde's video they are basically spot on, I don't think anyone could tell it's not De Gaulle with any certitude.

China didn’t introduce simplified characters until 1949, before then they were using traditional characters. If you read one (simplified or traditional), you can generally read the other. So they’re not that distinctive and while pronounced differently, their meaning is the same.

I haven’t looked into it - but I imagine it’s linked to cultural identity and nationhood. If the Japanese abolished Kanji, they would also be restricting access to some of their greatest works of literature and their written history. During periods of nation building, these soft powers are needed to construct the national narrative.

How does one go about doing something like this? What were the steps you followed to do this?

It’s explained in the short video.

They had three different written versions of the speech from three different sources but no actual recording to know which is the actual one.

They then found a guy who had access to Swiss military archives and apparently Switzerland kept extensive transcriptions of radio broadcasts in their archives and they had a very thorough transcription of the speech in swiss german. They translated it and compared it to the three other french versions they had to make what was most likely a very close transcription.

Yes so my question is how it compares in terms of believability vs what you could achieve with an actor?

They did use a human actor and made him reproduce De Gaulle’s rhythm from actual recordings but without changing his voice. The AI intervened after that to modify the voice of the actor by analyzing the voices of De Gaulle and of the actor to make them match.

I assume they will, they are a major newspaper with excellent reputation, they can’t risk tarnishing that by forgetting that.

>Within the kiln complex, archaeologists were surprised to find the remains of a man inside a kiln with his legs sticking out.

That's crazy. So not only did a ton of people die, but the area was just left in complete and total destruction. Not even corpses were moved... for centuries.