Virtual News at Seven

Posted on Oct 26, 2006

From Northwestern.edu

A group of researchers at Northwestern University may have rendered TV news reporters obsolete with this completely automated and virtual newscast, in which a video game character reads news culled from RSS feed, and the screen behind her displays relevant photos and videos. Pretty cool.

Watch one episode:

Northwestern University:

News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.

Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.

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