Execution

December 2017 to January 2018 - Ideation and Design process. February 2018 - Prototyping process February 2018 - April 2018 - Integration of the system to the prototype April 2018 - Final product The campaign ran from 14th June 2017 till 28th June 2018.

The Campaign

171 million rural workers headed to big cities to seek better futures for their families. As a result, millions of children are left behind and suffer from emotional trauma because of the feeling of abandonment. Tencent wants to connect the gap between parents and their children through technology. Hear My Love's AI speaker was created and it tell stories to children; in the voice of the father or the mother. It uses voice recognition technology; utilizing deep neural networks to re-create the voice of the parent(s). First, speech fragments from either the father or mother are recorded. We feed these fragments to the deep neural networks that then analyses the speech patterns and recreate more representations of them in different tonalities and stages of complexity. Finally, a text-to-speech system is created using the specific voice that was created. The AI system is then housed in a custom-built speaker.

Creative Execution

It uses voice recognition technology; utilizing deep neural networks to re-create the voice of the parent(s). First, speech fragments from either the father or mother are recorded. We feed these fragments to the deep neural networks that then analyses the speech patterns and recreate more representations of them in different tonalities and stages of complexity. Finally, a text-to-speech system is created using the specific voice that was created. The AI system is then housed in a custom-built speaker.

Till date, 3,200 speakers were produced and distributed to children in China’s vast rural areas. This created a conversation about the impact of rural-to-urban migration and how it affects the future generation of China. Online conversation about this issue was seeded on social media by key opinion leaders. On Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter), people are beginning to express appreciation and empathy for migrant workers. The project was shared on both Weibo and WeChat, gaining traction as time goes. It was also reported by China's largest news agency, Xinhua News. There’s recognition for Tencent that uses its technology to innovatively alleviate societal issues. Most importantly, Hear My Love shines the spotlight on an issue that China forgets - in the rush for development, the rural areas are emptying into urban cities at a cost that China cannot afford to pay.

Hear My Love's AI speaker uses voice recognition technology to tell stories to left-behind children. Through a speaker that houses this AI technology, left-behind children can hear stories in the voices of their parents. This experience brings to life a complex social issue that China currently faces - the left-behind children. Hear My Love hopes to bridge the physical and emotional distance that both parents and children face by immersing them in an experience; in the hope that technology can really bridge emotional bonds.