Podcast: COMPRISE, the privacy-friendly, inclusive voice interface

Listen to Emmanuel Vincent, the project coordinator of COMPRISE, Nathalie Vauquier, the engineer in charge of Inria’s software development in COMPRISE, and Brij Srivastava, a young researcher who has joined Inria Startup Studio on October 1, 2021, to create a startup exploiting the results of the project. https://www.inria.fr/en/podcast-comprise-privacy-friendly-inclusive-voice-interface  

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Fifth Plenary Meeting

The fifth COMPRISE plenary meeting was held remotely on June 28, 2021. We were thrilled to welcome the following advisory board members: Gaël Duval (e.foundation) Johannes Fischer (Fraunhofer IIS, SPEAKER Project) Tom Vanallemeersch (ELRC Project) Georgeta Bordea and Jean-Luc Rouas (FVLLMONTI Project)

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Ethics in Voice Technologies

Ethical concerns related to the use of voice technologies The ethical use of voice technologies, such as speech and voice recognition, is becoming more important every day. Devices such as smart speakers, smartphones or smartwatches collect massive amounts of data from users thanks to the wide range of activities they…

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COMPRISE’s feedback to the EDPB guidelines on Virtual Voice Assistants

COMPRISE has provided input to the European Data Protection Board’s (EDPB) consultation on its draft guidelines on virtual assistants (“Guidelines 02/2021 on Virtual Voice Assistants”) published on 9th March, 2021.   Check at the following link the comments provided by COMPRISE! https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/webform/public_consultation_reply/edpb_feedback_by_comprise.pdf

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COMPRISE @ Region Grand Est

Today, Emmanuel Vincent introduced COMPRISE and the impact of European funding on research and innovation to a large audience of academic and industry researchers. This was part of a series of webinars on Horizon Europe organized by Region Grand Est. Today’s webinar called “Investing in digital technologies: from research to production, for…

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The COMPRISE Weakly Supervised Speech-to-Text and COMPRISE Weakly Supervised Natural Language Understanding Tools have been released!

The joint efforts of the COMPRISE consortium continue bearing results as the COMPRISE Weakly Supervised Speech-to-Text (STT) and COMPRISE Weakly Supervised Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Tools have been released have been released. The COMPRISE Weakly Supervised STT and COMPRISE Weakly Supervised NLU are innovative software tools for automatic data transcription…

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The COMPRISE Cloud Platform

Overview The COMPRISE Cloud Platform provides a highly scalable, open-source, cloud-based solution for the management of multilingual speech and text data and models. The COMPRISE Cloud Platform offers a web application programming interface (API) and a web-based user interface (UI) which allow users to upload, store and manage speech and…

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COMPRISE WEAKLY SUPERVISED NLU

Discover COMPRISE Weakly Supervised NLU, an innovative automatic data labelling and model training software for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Today’s Deep Learning technology is hungry for data – the more, the better. But for many tasks, raw data is not enough: every sample of data needs to be labelled first,…

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Software b

COMPRISE SDK   Thanks to COMPRISE SDK, developers can create multilingual, voice-enabled applications in a faster, cost-effective, and privacy-driven way. The SDK is made for Smartphone applications developed with the Ionic framework, with Angular as a foundation. It consists of: the COMPRISE Personal Server, which allows the execution of large related…

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Our article “How can Private Information Recorded by Voice-enabled Systems be Identified?” has been published by the European Data Protection Law Review!

Voice technologies are being used in fields as diverse as medicine and education, but also for pure leisure. This article offers an overview of how categorisation and contextualisation can be used as methods not only to identify personal information but to design private-by-design voice-based solutions that intend to neutralise personal data and information/words that…

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Meetup @CNIL

Following the release of their white paper on voice assistants, the French data protection authority CNIL and Le VoiceLab will host a meetup on September 7 at 18:00 addressing the ethical, technical, and legal issues raised by voice assistants. Emmanuel Vincent, whose interview can be read in the white paper, will present ongoing…

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Comprise SDK

Overview Are you a developer? Thanks to the COMPRISE SDK, you can now create multilingual, voice-enabled applications in a faster, cost-effective, and privacy-driven way. The SDK is made for Smartphone applications developed with the Ionic framework, with Angular as a foundation. It consists of: The COMPRISE Client Library, which can…

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COMPRISE @Interspeech 2020

Six papers showcasing COMPRISE’s research advances have been accepted for publication at Interspeech 2020 ! Privacy guarantees for de-identifying text transformations [David Adelani, Ali Davody, Thomas Kleinbauer, Dietrich Klakow] A comparative study of speech anonymization metrics [Mohamed Maouche, Brij Mohan Lal Srivastava, Nathalie Vauquier, Aurélien Bellet, Marc Tommasi, Emmanuel Vincent] On semi-supervised…

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Our first privacy preservation tools have been released!

The COMPRISE Voice Transformer and the COMPRISE Text Transformer protect both the voice of the users and their personal information. These software tools can be easily integrated into existing voice technologies, and provide developers with open source, validated, private-by-design tools. The development of privacy-enhancing technologies in Europe is a crucial step forward in ensuring the resilience…

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COMPRISE @TSD’2020

Additional papers for the COMPRISE project have been accepted! The most recent ones will be published at the 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD’2020), and are the following: “Investigating the Impact of Pre-trained Word Embeddings on Memorization in Neural Networks” [Aleena Thomas, David Adelani, Ali Davody, Aditya Mogadala,…

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Third Plenary Meeting

The third COMPRISE plenary meeting was held remotely on June 03-04, 2020. We were thrilled to welcome the following advisory board members: Georg Rehm (META-NET) Fredrik Kronlid and Staffan Larsson (Talkamatic) Norbert Pfleger (Paragon Semvox) Eren Gölge (Mozilla)

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Special Issue on Voice Privacy

We are co-organizing a special issue on Voice Privacy that solicits papers describing advances in privacy protection for speech processing systems, including theoretical developments, algorithms or systems. Examples of topics relevant to the special issue include (but are not limited to): formal models of speech privacy preservation, privacy-preserving speech feature extraction,…

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COMPRISE Features Two Main Branches

> The operating branch runs a spoken dialogue system on the user’s device or on a personal server. The dialogue outcomes are sent to the company delivering the desired service only. The training branch removes personal information from voice data using privacy driven text and voice transformers. The transformed data are sent to the COMPRISE Cloud-based Platform to train the spoken dialogue system. COMPRISE VOICE TRANSFORMER Prevents…

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Privacy vs. usability

In our previous posts [Post1] and [Post2], we have presented a rather streamlined version of the issue at hand and introduced quite a few simplifications along the way. Still, we have seen that privacy transformations of text are complex. A number of challenges presented themselves and we have discussed a…

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COMPRISE is supporting the VoicePrivacy 2020 Challenge!

Registration is still open to take part in the first international challenge on speech data privacy. The VoicePrivacy initiative is spearheading the effort to develop privacy preservation solutions for speech technology. It aims to gather a new community to define the most effective processes and metrics, while also benchmarking the existing privacy-enabling solutions and creating…

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Handling private information in text

Removing sensitive portions from a text, sometimes known as “sanitizing”, is often done by simply blackening the relevant words. Many people have seen such a redacted document at some point, it’s a technique commonly applied to classified government reports, for instance. A prominent example of such a document from recent…

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Business Opportunities Around Voice Enabled Technologies

Compatibility and integration are becoming essential features for voice technologies. The expected increase in the development of mid-level devices, which are able to connect with smart speakers, although not being fully smart themselves, serves as the perfect example [Ref1]. Despite the popularity of voice technologies, 41% of voice users report concerns on trust, privacy and…

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COMPRISE @Rue89 Strasbourg

Emmanuel Vincent from INRIA was invited for a debate entitled “What voice assistants really know about us?”. Emmanuel explained the idea behind the COMPRISE project by highlighting the need to create a methodology that will protect the users’ data, in order to ensure their privacy. This was broadcast via the Rue89 Strasbourg media! Check…

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Voice-based applications for E-Health

Healthcare has been one of the countless beneficiaries of the revolutionary advances that widespread computing has brought. Fast, efficient data organisation, storage and access that have greatly sped up the medical enterprise, yet many low hanging fruits remain hanging. Chief among those is the increased application of technologies that can…

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Workshop for Riga’s Children’s Hospital

Our partner Tilde has organized a workshop for Riga’s Children’s Hospital. The workshop covered two main topics: (1) eventual use-case scenarios for two Tilde/COMPRISE demonstrators and (2) availability of data for system training and testing. Participants got brief introduction of the COMPRISE project and its objectives as well as the underlying technologies of…

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COMPRISE @CCS’2019

As part of COMPRISE, the work “Private Protocols for U-Statistics in the Local Model and Beyond” [James Bell, Aurélien Bellet, Adria Gascon, Tejas Kulkarni] has been accepted for presentation at two workshops part of CCS’2019: Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) and Privacy Preserving Machine Learning (PPML). Congratulations to our team!…

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COMPRISE @Science festival

Emmanuel Vincent, Irina Illina, and Brij Mohan Lal Srivastava demonstrated the privacy-driven voice transformation technology developed in COMPRISE as part of the Science festival at Université de Lorraine! It was a great interaction between INRIA’s members and several groups of junior high school students, students and staff of Université de Lorraine…

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COMPRISE @Showcase H2020 and INEA

COMPRISE was presented at the “Showcasing Language Technology in H2020 and CEF Telecom Projects” workshop that was held on the 26 of April 2019 in Brussels. The workshop introduced Digital Service Infrastructures and their stakeholders at Member State level to language technology related projects in the H2020 program and in CEF…

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COMPRISE @ ICT2018

Emmanuel Vincent attended the networking session entitled Where Multilingualism, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence meet: Language Technologies for the Next Generation Internet organized by META-NET and LT Innovate at the ICT 2018 conference on December 4, 2018. A summary of the 7 projects accepted under the ICT-29-2018 call was presented, including COMPRISE. He met…

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