World’s First AI News Anchor Makes its Debut in China
These AI anchors are powered by machine learning, NLG and GANs. They can continuously operate 24 hours a day
We spoke to Xiaowan L., a Software Engineer directly involved on the AI Anchors project, led by Xinhua News Agency, China’s state-run press agency which unveiled the new “AI anchors” — digital composites created from continuously train on footage data based on human hosts that read the news using synthesized voices.
Xiowan, (Who asked us to maintain confidentiality of her last-name) told us this morning that the developed artificial intelligence anchors are a product of machine learning, NLG (natural language generation a sub-branch of natural language processing — NLP) and GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) — Xinhua News Agency has used such machine learning technologies as a base, along footage data of human anchors, to then animate parts of the mouth and face to turn the speaker into a virtual puppet with the help of cycle-GANs; lastly combining this with a synthesized voice (with the help of natural language generation — NLG). Xinhua News Agency has been able to program the digital anchors to read the news, far quicker than using traditional CGI.
