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Automatic Machinima News-Broadcasting

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the almost-listenable dept.

MattSparkes writes "Researchers claim to have produced software that automatically generates timely video news bulletins, presented by computer-animated characters, which could revolutionise current affairs broadcasting. The system, called News at Seven, takes RSS news feeds and does some formatting before passing it to an avatar from Half-Life 2 to read out. Based on keywords, the system also draws in video from YouTube and images from Flickr to supplement the speech."

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:i wonder by gt_mattex · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder if the technology develops sufficiently will actual news anchors be worried about their jobs?

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    "No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
  2. Thank God ! by MarkKnopfler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Soon, we can rename The O'Reilly factor as Tomb Raider and replace that bald CGI character with Lara Croft !

  3. Re:I love the idea by recordMyRides · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or, just wait for it to screw up on its own. Fark, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc pick it up, broadcasting the results to millions! A few days ago, Google news featured a story about Jessica Simpson. The picture it included with the story was a topless photoshoped image. A similar screw up from something like this could be epic!

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  4. Re:I love the idea by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Oh, and on a side note, I thought that HL2 characters could be fed lines and they would automaticly speak them as well as forming the proper mouth movements....

    Not really - the game uses recorded speech files (from flesh-and-blood voice actors) which are then run through various external tools to extract phonemes and visemes.

    I remember seeing someone's HL2-related work on text-to-speech a while back - it appears to be the same system being used for this News at Seven thingy. One nifty feature:

    There also exists C++ code to produce lip-synched speech truly on the fly, which is then spoken externally, but concurrently with, the HL2 engine. Essentially, there is a function in the codebase that takes a string to say, speaks the string through the TTS engine, and lipsyncs the actors' lips as the text is being spoken. With this technique, for example, you could have a cute multiplayer mod where any messages sent textually are actually pronounced on the other clients' machines.

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