Paris (AFP)

Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant: Developed by US tech giants, millions of voice assistants have entered homes in recent years. Faced with this hegemony, the French players are trying to make their way, turning in particular to the professional market.

"Launched early in the race for voice technology", the Gafam (acronym for the US groups Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) have "quickly preempted the market," says a study firm Roland Berger, published in the summer latest.

Regarding France, "it is very advanced in terms of academic research, but very late in commercial offer, as for other subjects related to artificial intelligence," said AFP Ghislain de Pierrefeu, partner at Wavestone.

Despite this configuration, French companies specialized in voice technologies do not give up and multiply initiatives.

The Gafam "have helped to democratize the voice, but do not know how to do certain things, we can be as good on certain subjects," comments AFP Florian Guichon, director of operations and partner of Vivoka, met at the show Voice Tech which is held until Wednesday in Paris.

Founded in 2015, this young company based in Metz develops tailor-made voice solutions for companies, targeting hotels, industry, distribution and banking.

- The pros market? "A boulevard" -

"The B to B (professionals to professionals), it is a boulevard", estimates with AFP Yann Lechelle, former director of operations of Snips, start-up at the origin of a voice control technology working without internet, bought by Sonos, American specialist connected speakers, for 37.5 million dollars.

"There is a real market for companies offering bricks voice recognition technology, it may interest actors who need a customer relationship and do not want to entrust the US giants," abounds with AFP Sylvain Chevallier, a partner at BearingPoint.

By partnering with various partners, for example, the Orange operator has jointly developed with Deutsche Telekom its Djingo voice assistant, enabling its subscribers to better interact with its various services (television, telephony, etc.). to other types of queries, the connected speaker also ships Alexa from Amazon.

For some, the lines can still move. "The Gafam have an overwhelming power, but that does not mean that it is sustainable, regulators, lobbies and actors can set up many things that change the situation," said Mr. Lechelle, recalling that some groups have already seen their influence reduced to a trickle, like Yahoo.

The question of the use of personal data, which remains relatively opaque, could particularly be detrimental to some US giants.

- Voices to drive the algorithms -

For young French actors, who generally favor a data protection-based approach, there are still many challenges.

"These are technologies that require significant investments, we are on a logic of artificial intelligence where there is learning, which takes time," decrypts Mr. Chevallier.

Thousands of hours of audio recording are needed to teach algorithms to recognize human speech. But French start-ups face an obstacle.

"We do not have enough data to train models," says Karel Bourgois, founder of Voxist, who offers a smart answering machine, able to personalize the greeting and transcribe voice messages.

To overcome this lack, Mr. Bourgois and other entrepreneurs have recently founded "The Voice Lab" which intends to constitute a voice corpus of 100,000 hours, including voices of people of all ages and different accents.

Eventually, this association bringing together some thirty start-ups and laboratories aims to become a market place where an industrialist can find the different "bricks" to assemble his voice assistant in French.

© 2019 AFP