Alembic and Havas Life Mumbai turn to AI to help speech-impaired mothers sing a lullaby

Called 'LullabAI', it takes a short voice note of the mother and generates a lullaby in their voice.

When it comes to lullabies, babies do not need rhythm or rhyme. All they need is their mother’s voice. But what happens when a mother is speech-impaired and cannot sing to her little one? Pharma Co Alembic’s CSR arm and Havas Life Mumbai turned to generative artificial intelligence (AI) and made it generate lullabies in these mothers’ voices.

An ode to LullabAI if you may.

LullabAI transforms short voice samples from speech-impaired mothers into lullabies. Using advanced data cleaning, augmentation, and model training techniques, LullabAI captures and applies the mother’s voice to a library of pre-recorded lullabies. The lullabies are only in Hindi but will expand to other languages soon.

The challenging bit of this work was the lack of available data. Using generative A.I. to make Kishore Kumar sing a modern Bollywood song is easy because the technology can access Kumar’s vocals, frequency, and pitch, among other needed aspects, but there is so data of speech-impaired mothers.

It was the brainchild and work of not only Alembic CSR and Havas Life Mumbai, but also Pune-based tech company Perpetual Block which works with generative AI, sound designer Anmol Bhave, and Brandmusiq which its founder Rajeev Raja claims is a “creative agency of sound.”

This project is phase three of the pharma company’s For Her, With Her umbrella campaign. Phase one targeted heavy menstrual bleeding and the second phase took a stand against Anaemia.

During the AI platform’s press conference, Sachin Talwalkar, chief creative officer, Havas Life Mumbai, said, “90% of great campaigns are great executions” and revealed once he had the idea and got the green signal, he and Raja spent months brainstorming to come up with the proof of concept. “It is the first of its kind in the world,” claims Talwalkar.

Atul Suri, Sr. Vice President and SBU Head at Alembic Pharmaceuticals, revealed it’s a digital-first campaign because “deep penetration can come only with digital and technology.” During the conference, he said the pharma company will take the A.I. platform to nearly 35,000 gynaecologists to further its reach.

When asked about the life of such work because many times they don’t go all the way and ‘purpose’ beings to get a bad reputation, Suri quipped, “So by the very fact that the For Her, With Her campaign has been on for more than two and a half years, I think that's testimony enough of our commitment to this entire thing. And it's not that we've just hopped off and gone on to something else, we've remained committed to women's health…”

On how his team comes up with insights for the umbrella campaign, Suri gives credit to his team which meets the gynaecologists twice a month and works closely with The Federation of Obstetric and Gynecological Societies of India.

And then there is the fact that Alembic has gone on radio and national television too for the earlier phases. “We have a lot of talk shows, debates, getting leading panellists to speak on these medical conditions so that awareness happens.”

Alembic has not planned any television spends for LullabAI, but if the opportunity presents itself, the company will consider it.

There are other use cases for this AI platform as well that were sprouted during the press conference. Babies respond more to their mothers so if she's not around, a father can use LullabAI to put the baby to sleep.

Or when Pritha Dasgupta, chief marketing officer, Havas India, said she plans to use LullabAI to record lullabies in her mother's voice. "This way, her voice will stay with me forever."