Lunii, the children’s storyteller, uses generative AI

Children’s storytellers are entering a new era. Well known to young listeners and parents wishing to offer their children an alternative to interactive screens, the Lunii history factory just announced the release of The Leprechauns of Fondujardina new audiobook that is fully customizable using artificial intelligence.

AI serving the imagination

While Lunii’s story factory has until now allowed you to personalize your own story by following a simple decision-making path, the new adventure proposed by the brand will allow you to deeply personalize the story parameters: appearance of the protagonists, first names of the characters… several elements can be modified as desired, to create a unique experience for each child, by combining voice synthesis and artificial intelligence.

To train the speech synthesis models, Lunii used the Jean-Zay platform of IDRIS (the Institute of Development and Computer Resources of the CNRS), a public platform, financed by the State, which offers access free access to the latest computing technologies to the scientific community and French businesses, in many fields, such as Artificial Intelligence.

What future for voice actors?

If we can ask ourselves the question of the future of actors and voice actresses, who regularly accuse generative technologies of threatening their activity, the initiative has the merit of being interesting.

In his announcement, the company wants to be reassuring regarding the use of speech synthesis. For voice actress Jeanne Chartier, who lends her voice to the story, it is above all a question of evolving with AI, without fear of being replaced by technology: “When Lunii offered to synthesize my voice with an AI, I was scared at first! I wondered how valuable I would be if an AI could do the same thing as me, but without me. Then, I realized that it was absurd to want to go against evolution, and that these are tools to make our work easier“. It remains to be seen how the project will materialize in the ears of children. For the company, it is firstly “to enrich the narrative experience” : “This technology allows us to include three first names in the story, whether common or invented by children, which would be impossible to achieve otherwise.“.