Efficiency and avatars

A leading technologist has told the Making the Media Podcast of efficiency gains which news broadcasters are seeking to make using AI, including experimenting with AI-generated news readers.

Miro Ambra is the chief technology officer of the Slovakian-based system integrator and software developer, Traco Systems.

Traco have developed AI tools that integrate with Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX. Miro says this heralds a new era in journalism, with AI assisting reporters and helping them verify sources. He says they have also begun preliminary work to create an AI-generated presenter for one customer, looking at options for reading short bulletins overnight.

“There is potential risk because those avatars can be like deepfakes. So the watcher can’t recognize whether it's a real person or not. And it could be dangerous for the fake news of this big stuff. Therefore, we decided to do 3D avatars, so everybody will know that this is not the real person—this is 3D. This, and another reason why we chose the 3D avatar is because of virtual reality or augmented reality, because we can place the virtual 3D avatar into the real space, for example, and be interactive.”

In the new episode of the podcast, he also discusses how web-based tools are already enhancing the work of journalists across the globe, giving them a single application where they can do their work, removed from the shackles of being tied to a desk or working with machines requiring expensive hardware.

“Right now, we are not tied with the locations. This is very key. And therefore, we did this development for the Traco applications like the VizRT integration, these are to have all those tools which are necessary for the journalists, for the production of the news right into the fingertips of the journalist. So just to have one unified, centralized desktop which works on a standard browser. So, it is not necessary to have some significant huge or powerful hardware.”

Miro also discusses the use of the cloud in news production and shares his view on how applicable it is in high pressure, time-constrained situations.

Find out more on the next episode of the Making the Media Podcast, available on all major podcast platforms on Friday, October 4.