Avatars: the future of news?
The beleaguered news industry faces a new threat: automated video news. News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. ...
The beleaguered news industry faces a new threat: automated video news.
News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.
But if you watch the December 20th broadcast below, you quickly see that while News at Seven may be cool, it's not quite ready for prime time:
The beleaguered news industry faces a new threat: automated video news.
News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news–augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.
But if you watch the December 20th broadcast below, you quickly see that while News at Seven may be cool, it's not quite ready for prime time:
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington says that the three-minute broadcasts are "brilliant, and probably useless," complaining that News at Seven "is not an efficient way to consume news, for any demographic." Maybe so, but I'm not sure that's the point of the research.
News at Seven is funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars via a $268,112 National Science Foundation grant. The real goal is not to replace Katie Couric, but to advance the study of artificial intelligence.
This project uses the realm of believable improvisational performance agents to investigate the larger issues of scalability and robustness, which have long been problematic in AI systems. […] This work is, in part, aimed at a new role for the machine in the world: a role in which the machine is used to expose the world of communication and cultural connections that are linked together by and within the grasp of online systems.
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