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China's State news outlet Xinhua, has debuted "AI anchors"
The company created these "AI anchors" from digital composites of human anchors and gave them synthesized voices to deliver the news. Other than those details, the agency has kept the technology used in bringing this anchorman to life under wraps.
Checking out the animation, the speech is surprisingly good and far better than the terrible robo voices on some video channels. The British accented English speaking video anchor proudly claims
I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my system uninterrupted
And, this being China, there's the capitalism angle:
One of the best parts of having an AI anchor? "He" doesn't sleep, said the press agency.
"According to Xinhua, "he" has become a member of its reporting team and can work 24 hours a day on its official website and various social media platforms, reducing news production costs and improving efficiency," the Xinhua media team noted.
An interesting advantage in the land of 1.4 billion people.
We'll just have to see how these guys compare with good ol' Max
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday March 08 2019, @05:08PM (1 child)
This just looks like sophisticated animation to me. If all the anchor is doing is reading what is being texted to it, that's just animation. Wake me when they start doing live interviews and coming up with their own questions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday March 08 2019, @05:24PM
This is coming out of China. If they do an interview, both sides will be scripted to ensure that the official news line is not crossed.
That said, while it may not be AI, it's an artificial human simulation in a job role where the desire is putting a human face on a pre-scripted presentation. And it is reportedly don't a decent job of that. That the job doesn't require intelligence, but merely following orders is one reason it's easy to automate. Acting sufficiently like a natural human to provoke empathic acceptance is the hard part of THIS job.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.