Automatic Machinima News-Broadcasting

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."

Comments

Sweet!

[Cleon]

Nifty! Now, how long before they come up with a Max Headroom version? :D

And in other news...

[d474]

...is me. I have been created. I speak about news. Thank you for watching.

i wonder

[kevin.fowler]

I wonder if it's broadcasting about this story.

woah META NEWS

Re:i wonder

[gt_mattex]

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

Re:i wonder

[gt_mattex]

So did a great many factory workers when asked if their jobs could ever be automated by 'machines' run by 'computers'. A great many things seemed unlikely in the past and are common place today. Hell a great many things seemed unlikely 50 years ago what will the next 50 bring? Is automated news anchors that far out of the perspective?

Re:i wonder

[LindseyJ]

DON'T DATE ROBOTS.

Re:i wonder

[Silver Sloth]

Most people aren't worth relating to

When the scared little boy comes out from behind that wall of 'superiority' that he has put in front of him he'll find that people, all people, is what it's all about.

I love the idea

[Thansal]

However, Ihave to admit that it would just be FAR to tempting to do a google bomb style prank with this.

1) Generate a number of silly write ups/pictures/videos
2) Wait around for a tempting news article (dubbya saying something inflamitory)
3) Post all of your existing junk with titles that relate to the news piece
4) ?????
5) Laugh as they get included! (err, I mean profit, right)

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....

Re:I love the idea

[recordMyRides]

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!

Re:I love the idea

[Ford Prefect]

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.

Skeptical

[geekmansworld]

Isn't this the basically the same thing as Ananova? And didn't that come out, like, 6 years ago? I am skeptical. News anchors, don't start looking for a new job just yet.

Re:Skeptical

[peragrin]

well Ananova is British, and therefore it doesn't count until the Americans do it. Caus our president says we be better.

Note I love ananova. The selection of news stories there is the simply the best. You can read about the strangest stuff on there.

Re:Skeptical

[LostCluster]

Ananova was an automated presentation system, but she/it read from scripts generated by humans.

News ain't what it used to be

[Toby The Economist]

No matter how it's presented, what's being presented isn't news.

News is properly defined as functional information.

However, in our day and age, where television *is* our culture, the definition of news is *news as seen on TV* - and news on TV, like everything passed through that medium, is converted into entertainment.

And that's why we no longer have a meaningful public discourse; news, news everywhere, and not a functional fact to think about.

Thank God !

[MarkKnopfler]

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

I can see it already...

[Control Group]

This just in!

"They're waiting for you, Gordon - in the test chamber."

Cutscene at 11.

Links

[martyb]

Here are some links for your viewing pleasure:

news at seven home page

Video Demonstration of News at Seven - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 24Mb)

Video Demonstration of News at Seven Celebrity News - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 25Mb)

Video Demonstration of News at Seven Science News - 10/16/06 (.wmv - 12Mb)

News at Seven on the ABC News Tonight podcast.

Video demonstration of News At Seven.

But what about the BIAS?

[Some_Llama]

"before passing it to an avatar from Half-Life 2 to read out"

It won't be long until these "avatars" start biasing the news towards their personal beliefs.. like denegrating head crabs, or constantly slanting the news against Dr. Breen.

Not to mention the crowbar lobby's already powerful influence...

Already in production

[rlp]

CBS has been using this technology for their evening news since September 5th. I think that the virtual presenter is named 'Katie'.