I bet we'll see more of this in the years to come...lots more. Like having your own personal new anchor-bot. It's a program that (all by itself) checks headlines, then collects images and video to match the stories, then mashes it altogether to be read by a synthetic anchor person. The downloads to watch the demos take f o r e v e r to load, but it's worth it. Pretty cool.
[hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"][h2]News At Seven[/h2] 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.
[a href="vny!://destroyer.cs.northwestern.edu/videos/NewsAtSeven10-16.wmv"]Video Demonstration of News at Seven - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 24Mb)[/a]
[a href="vny!://destroyer.cs.northwestern.edu/videos/NewsAtSevenCeleb10-16.wmv"]Video Demonstration of News at Seven Celebrity News - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 25Mb)[/a]
[a href="vny!://destroyer.cs.northwestern.edu/videos/NewsAtSevenScience10-16.wmv"]Video Demonstration of News at Seven Science News - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 12Mb)[/a]
[a href="vny!://destroyer.cs.northwestern.edu/videos/wnt.mov"]News at Seven on the ABC News Tonight podcast[/a].
[a href="vny!://www.cs.northwestern.edu/%7Endn651/NewsAtSeven.wmv"]Video demonstration of News At Seven[/a].
