Chinese state press agency introduces AI-newsreader.

The Chinese state press agency Xinhua is going to use an ‘AI newsreader’. The presenter is a computer-generated copy of a real newsreader at the desk and his voice is also based on that of his counterpart of flesh and blood.

The digital Zhang Zhao introduces himself in a short YouTube video. Although the ‘newsreader’ knows how to convince reasonably well, it can be clearly seen that at the mouth a nice uncanny valley- the effect is in progress. His voice also sounds like a bored robot for the time being, although that may also be the case with the Zhang Zhao of flesh and blood.

The presenter is presented as being a form of ai, but it is not entirely clear whether this is the case is. What we see is an animated 3d model of a news reader with lip sync for the text-to-speech. Nothing in it indicates an artificial intelligence that can independently perform certain tasks. His reading text is also being introduced by people.

Xinhua uses a total of two of these news readers; one for English and one for Chinese, although they probably have the same appearance. The news reader is immediately deployed on the various channels of Xinhua. According to the South China Morning Post the ai newsreader was created in collaboration with the company behind the Chinese search engine Sogou .

In the area of robot news readers, Japan is also nice to work on the road. The ’23 -year-old ‘Erica has to start working as a newsreader somewhere in 2018 in Japan. However, it is a real robot and not generated by a computer.