ai virtual news anchor

No job is safe from robots–even the Daily Dot’s. China’s state media debuted a new AI virtual news anchor designed to deliver report 24 hours per day with an ghostly gumption of realism.

Xinhua, the Chinese government’s official state media syndicate, debuted the virtual linchpin Wednesday at a conference in the city of Wuzhen.

“Hello, you are watching English news program. I’m AI news anchor in Beijing, ” the AI says in a demo spool affixed by Xinhua on Twitter before launching into a series of brief information stories.

Xinhua AI anchor, launched on Wednesday, starts presenting news reports from Thursday. In this programme, he takes you to have a look at what a Panama official and the Chinese financier Jack Ma say about the ongoing #CIIE. pic.twitter.com/ OZkRQtv1sQ

— China Xinhua News (@ XHNews) November 8, 2018

The reel itself is largely b-roll corresponding to the various tales, so the reel is far more of an audio-based proof than a visual one. That said, the few glimpses of the virtual fasten in a classic suit and tie are pretty impressive. He’s not exactly emoting very convincingly( most fastens wouldn’t ), but the level of detail is quite surprising–from the darkness on the anchor’s clothing to the individual whisker on his head.

The anchor is able to get through a number of floors without any major issues, but it’s far away from being mistaken for a real human. You can hear it in the intonations and the channel it sometimes doesn’t rest or breathe between sentence fragments.

“The development of the media manufacture calls for continual innovation, and penetrating integration with the international advanced technologies, ” the AI secure says in a separate video. “I will work tirelessly to maintain you informed as texts will be typed into my organisation uninterrupted. I look forward to introducing you the brand new word[ sic] experiences.”

In a moment of uncanny valley horror, you’ll notice the AI anchor slipping into a slack-jawed show right after finishing such statements in the video above.

The anchor is modeled after the real-life Xinhua anchor Zhang Zhao. The BBC has noted that “it appears that photo-like facial boasts have been applied to a person template and animated.”

Xinhua is exclusively looking to “reduce news production costs and improve efficiency.” According to CNN, Xinhua hasn’t said whether any of China’s other state-run media paths are interested in collecting the technology.

For decades, China has rehearsal an extreme degree of sovereignty and censorship over its country’s media organizations, including social media and other scaffolds. A report by the Intercept in September stated that Google is freely bind search engine consumption to the phone numbers of individual citizens, standing the government to track who searches for controversial content.

H/ T CNN

The post China has an AI news anchor toiling 24/7 materialized firstly on The Daily Dot.

Read more: dailydot.com