The second of two flight recorders from the Air France aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 has been recovered.
Search parties scouring the sea bed off Brazil's northeast coast made the discovery.
It comes two days after the flight data recorder was fished up and brings investigators even closer to the cause of the crash.
The audio recorder should hold recordings of cockpit conversations during the flight's final moments.
‘We can now hope to find out what truly happened within the next three weeks,’ French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani told RTL radio.
The investigation team identified the Cockpit Voice Recorder last night, France's BEA air accident inquiry office said in a statement. The device was hauled up to the team's ship early this morning.
A BEA spokeswoman said the black box would be shipped back to France, probably by the end of next week.
‘The outside appears to be in relatively good shape,’ she said, adding that it would only be possible to see if the recorder was ‘usable’ once it was opened, which would not happen until it was back in France.
So-called black boxes are painted orange so that they can be spotted more easily in wreckage.
The Airbus 330-203 airliner plunged into the sea off Brazil en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro in June 2009 after hitting stormy weather, killing all 228 passengers and crew.
Three Irish doctors were among the dead.
The discovery of the two flight recorders follows nearly two years of on-off search efforts over a 10,000sq.km area of seabed.
Depending on how much data can be retrieved and how clearly it pinpoints the cause of the crash, lawyers say information from the black boxes could lead to a flood of liability claims.
Any fresh conclusions on the cause will also be fed into a judicial probe already under way, in which Airbus and Air France have both been placed under formal investigation.
