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R&D
"What will the weather be like tomorrow? ", " call Bernard ", " remind me not to forget to buy bread at 7 pm ", " give me the recipe for apple crumble ", " send an SMS to Alexandra ", the uses are simple, multiple and useful, especially when you don't have your hands free: in the car, while cooking, in the shower...
But after thinking about it, another type of use comes naturally to us: accessibility, in other words access to digital services for people with disabilities, those excluded from the digital world or those who are illiterate, i.e. a total of almost 10 million people in France.
In particular, these assistants can offer a great service to blind people, representing nearly one million people in France. Let's take a closer look at this first.
While visually impaired people can understand a text read by a voice synthesizer much faster than an able-bodied person (up to 25 syllables per second compared to 10!) giving them in theory an advantage in terms of navigation by voice synthesis, access to digital services and navigation within them remains an obstacle course on the lambda website. To convince you of this, if you are lucky enough to be able to see this text, I challenge you to activate on your cell phone the accessibility mode and to navigate on the internet in order to understand the difficulties encountered daily by blind people.
France Télévisions is therefore working on these new conversational interfaces, making it possible to launch the broadcast of the audio-described version of a program by voice recognition: "I want to listen to France 2 in audiodescription", "I want to listen to the latest episode of Chefs in audiodescription".
This type of interface does not replace the good accessibility of a website, but complements these issues and may well in the near future become the simplest interface for the blind by integrating into connected speakers, smartphones, websites, mobile applications ...
France Télévisions invites you to discover the first prototype of this work: a simple and accessible website on which it is possible to listen to the audio-described streams of France Télévisions channels... And of course, to be able to start a stream by voice: "I want to listen to France 2", with a compatible browser.
For the moment, the onboard intelligence remains modest and is limited to locating the words "France 2", "France 3", and so on, without any real analysis of the intention given by the user, and offers to listen to the live stream in audio description - when available, mainly in "prime time", the evening's program.
Other steps will come soon: other platforms, other functionalities, more content, better language analysis, etc. So it's a deal to watch on the France Télévisions Lab!
