China's Xinhua News Agency Gets a Virtual Artificial Intelligence (AI) TV Anchor

China has got its first Artificial Intelligence (AI) news anchor. The anchor resembles a male human anchor with the voice and facial expressions of a real person. It can read the news in an exceedingly synthesized voice, designed to sound like a professional human anchor. The world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) news anchor has been created by China’s Xinhua news agency in with Chinese search engine company Sogou.

Two Artificial Intelligence (AI) news anchors which will scan the news in English, as well as Mandarin, were unveiled at the fifth World Internet Conference in China’s Zhejiang province.

According to reports from South China Morning Post and Xinhua, the news anchors will reduce the cost of daily TV news report, thanks to its ability to work 24 hours day. The AI TV anchor is also said to enhance potency as it will quickly generate breaking news. Something humans can’t do.

The anchor takes advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to combine images and voices of human anchors to deliver news with “the same effect” as human anchors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAfiATTQufk

The machine learning (ML) programme can generate lip movements, facial expressions etc like that of the human news anchor. Both the English and Mandarin news reading Artificial Intelligence (AI) anchors are available across Xinhua’s internet and mobile platforms, which includes its Mandarin and English apps as well as online TV webpage.

“Xinhua said the achievement was a “breakthrough in the field of global AI synthesis”, pioneering the synthesis of real-time audio and video with AI-created anchors in the news field. Search engine Sogou, that additionally will analysis and development in AI, is providing the underlying technology for the project,” South China Morning Post reports.

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