Martin Regley
01/26/2025 at 8:24 p.m.Updated on 01/26/2025 at 8:24 p.m.
In an interview broadcast in “Sept to Eight” this Sunday evening, the former sports boss of Canal+ talks about his fight against Charcot’s disease. It is because of the latter that he cannot speak, but thanks to intelligence, his voice has been reproduced.
A moving testimony. Resilience first, but also strength and passion. Suffering from Charcot’s disease, Charles Biétry, former head of sports at Canal+ and president of PSG, is completely silent. “The words are in my head and I can’t get them out,” explains the man at the microphone of Audrey Crespo-Mara who is releasing her memoir, “The Last Wave” at Flammarion. The Breton, lover of sport and nature, talks for more than 10 minutes about his fight against the disease, which condemns him to die in “the coming weeks or even a few months”.
For the purposes of the interview, his voice was recreated by artificial intelligence. “There was no question that the illness, which deprived him of speech, would prevent him from testifying if he wanted to,” insists Audrey Crespo-Mara to Le Parisien.
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Answers written then given to an AI
For this, the former journalist, now 81 years old, received the questions beforehand. Subsequently, it was he who put his answers on paper, before sending them back to TF1.
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-The text was then passed through an artificial intelligence, which reproduced – disconcertingly – identically the voice of Charles Biétry. For the software to capture and bring it out as close to reality as possible, the teams had to integrate numerous audio recordings of the man. It is thanks to this that artificial intelligence managed to recreate his voice as we knew it in the 1980s and 1990s. A technical feat.
Obviously, Charles Biétry agreed to do so. And obviously, he likes it. “Does the voice suit you,” the journalist asks him. Quickly, on a computer keyboard he writes “yes”. Then suddenly, the voice pronounces the word and Charles Biétry, with a thumbs up and a big smile, validates.
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There are many similar software programs for “cloning” a voice using artificial intelligence. This is why certain videos – for the purpose of disinformation – were posted with the voice of Emmanuel Macron or even former French political figures.
