Active Radio, together with Cognito, has launched fully automated spoken news. An AI avatar, a virtual double of presenter Tomáš Fíla, presents the morning and evening news summaries on the Frekvence 1 website. The pilot project shows what AI and automatic content generation can do.
From Evropa 2 to Frekvence 1
The collaboration between Active Radio and Cognito on deploying generative AI began with a brand campaign for Evropa 2, “Držíme ti flek i s AI”. Within it, Evropa 2 fans could generate and share their own images with popular presenters and virtually send them “somewhere”, for example to the desert or to the Moon. Although it was only a campaign, it was crucial for the creation of the AI news project. It showed us what potential there is in using available AI tools in media together with an important brand asset, the presenters.
Cloning Tomáš Fíla
The most important element of the spoken news is the presenter. For the pilot AI news project we chose the popular presenter Tomáš Fíla, who spent several hours in the studio at the start of the project so that we could record video and voice samples suitable for further processing. Today this process takes considerably less time. Thanks to improving technology and the growing experience of the team, it takes several dozen minutes. At the same time we can already create avatars with a wider range of gestures and more natural intonation, which are increasingly believable and harder to tell apart from their living original.
The pilot was also crucial for creating the legal framework, a way to properly regulate by contract the creation and use of an AI avatar with a presenter’s likeness and voice.
AI infrastructure
The most technologically advanced part of the project, generating the AI avatar, is handled by a pair of freely available tools: the HeyGen platform for creating the video and ElevenLabs for generating its audio track. These platforms are among the best and most popular tools in their categories, and they show how quickly generative AI technology is advancing in quality and at the same time becoming more accessible. With their help, the Cognito team created a digital replica of Tomáš Fíla. At CNC and Active Radio, however, these tools are used on many other projects, for example HeyGen for teaser videos for video content published on social networks, and ElevenLabs for the spoken version of articles on the website.
The source of the news is the news service of Frekvence 1 broadcasting itself, or rather its text transcript, which Cognito automatically downloads into its platform as a feed. To process the transcript into the final script, a freely available AI technology is used here too: ChatGPT, or rather its API in the GPT-4 version.
The model works in several steps. First it selects the news, then it creates a script from it, and then it optimises the script for reading by the AI presenter, for example by converting numbers into written form so that they are interpreted correctly in speech. The last input is an image illustrating each news item. It is generated by the Leonardo.AI tool, powered by Stable Diffusion models.
The whole process is completed by generating a video with the AI avatar, an illustrative image and a subtitle for each news item. This time we used the HeyGen platform for it. The resulting video is automatically saved to the Active Radio CDN (Content Delivery Network) and then published on the Frekvence 1 website. Currently there is a check before publication, but the whole process is fully automated.
Pilot launch and savings
The goal of the Cognito and Active Radio collaboration was to develop an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that would validate the concept of a fully automatic system for creating news coverage, including spoken news with a presenter based on a live model. Although the AI news is running in pilot operation, it has demonstrated the potential of using AI at Active Radio, a sister company of CNC.
Our secondary goal was to prove that such a system would have fundamentally lower content production costs while keeping output quality at a level that allows it to be monetised. In this respect it shows enormous potential: savings in the hundreds of thousands a year if we count two two-minute videos a day without a presenter, and in the low millions if two two-minute videos a day required a live presenter. The costs of the project itself were recouped in just four months of operation, thanks also to the use of commonly available AI tools and minimal need for custom development.
Continuing the project
The pilot launch of the AI presenter is just the beginning. Its integration into the media ecosystem opens wide possibilities for further automation in content creation. At Active Radio and CNC we plan to keep expanding the functions of the system, which will allow us not only to reduce costs further but also to find new ways of presenting news. AI presenters can be deployed in more formats and media, opening new opportunities for generating content and monetising it.
At the same time, other projects that use these AI tools and draw on the experience from the pilot are already running at Active Radio and CNC.
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