China is way ahead of the rest of the world and we’re talking about a lot of aspects where it has created new benchmarks.
This week, one of its premier news agencies has debuted the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) news anchor, reading out the content published by the entity at the World Internet Conference taking place in Wuzhen, China.
The entire project has been jointly developed by Xinhua and Chinese search engine company Sougou.
“The news anchor, based on the latest AI technology, has a male image with a voice, facial expressions and actions of a real person. "He" learns from live broadcasting videos by himself and can read texts as naturally as a professional news anchor”, Xinhua said in this post.
Interestingly, the anchor has become part of Xinhua’s reporting team and is capable of working for 24 hours on its official website and manage various social media platforms.
This, Xinhua believes, will help companies reduce production cost in a newsroom, bringing down the number of people hired, yet improving efficiency of how the work gets done.
AI is slowly becoming a part of our lives, whether we like it or not. What we have only seen on the television till now, is actually turning into a dark reality.
Facebook and Google have also deployed AI in their own form, where the former is curating content for its users, while the latter is using AI for things beyond the regular use case ie with features like Duplex.
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