For us, AI is not the future but part of everyday practice. We use it wherever it makes sense: from automating routine activities, through faster development, to creating new strategic projects that would have been practically impossible just a few years ago. As with other tools, however, it has to be used correctly and where it brings value.
Thanks to AI we are building new media
AI lets us create media projects of a completely new type, ones that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The best example is the project of fully automated broadcasting of spoken news on the Frekvence 1 website, which we developed together with Cognito. On the Frekvence 1 website, a summary of news is presented every morning and evening by an AI avatar, the virtual double of presenter Tomáš Fíla. The whole process, from collecting information from various sources through creating the AI avatar and generating accompanying photographs to publishing the videos, runs fully automatically.
A similar project would have cost CZK tens of millions a few years ago, taken years and produced a not very believable result. But thanks to advances in technology and tools such as HeyGen and ElevenLabs, we launched it at a fraction of the cost and time. And we will scale it to other projects.
AI allows us not only to expand broadcasting possibilities, but also to create entirely new types of media. One example is the currently tested project Koule.cz, a medium that, instead of generating new content, focuses on simplifying and reducing it. Our research showed that users, especially Gen Z, often suffer from information obesity: they feel overwhelmed by content, yet are afraid of missing something. Koule therefore provides news three times a day, cleared of information noise and clutter, and in a personalised form. This is thanks to an AI system that selects the most relevant articles from our content, automatically converts them into short news items, and at the same time oversees the right tone, context and accuracy, without errors and hallucinations.
AI is part of our infrastructure
AI brings new possibilities for automation and today it is already part of our infrastructure. We have used AI systems across our websites for years to optimise advertising and content, but generative AI has unlocked new possibilities for working with content. It is therefore now a fully fledged part of our CMS, improving the accuracy and value of content. It also handles translations, assists with optimising and summarising texts, and automated grammar checking guarantees error-free output in all languages. On top of the CMS we developed, together with the GoodSailors team, the AI Hub component. It automatically loads articles and processes their text. At the moment it creates summaries, estimates reading time and, above all, makes organising the database more efficient through more precise categorisation and tagging.
We also automatically create variants of existing content, typically video excerpts, their transcripts and embedded subtitles. We automatically add an audio version to articles, with the voice of the author. Because we are not active only in the Czech market, AI also localises videos for us, creating faithfully intonated multilingual videos in a fraction of the time and cost.
Last but not least, AI streamlines the creation of photo and video content. It helps us generate images to order, create visuals adapted to the editorial style and speed up the production of videos or content for social networks. For example, short stories for iSport are now made ten times faster than before and provide attractive summaries of sports news. Thanks to AI, articles stay constantly up to date and adapt to new information almost in real time.
AI for everyone
While some companies ban ChatGPT, we made it available to everyone through our internal CNC GPT. On top of a central OpenAI account we launched our own platform, which provides security, monitoring and cost efficiency. We removed shared accounts, simplified payment management and gained an overview of AI use across teams. At the same time our own platform allows better user-friendliness and the addition of required features: generating images with captions, speech-to-text conversion or video subtitling.
AI has become an essential tool for our everyday work, and everyone at CNC has an AI assistant, from junior editors to senior programmers. In development, in particular, the adoption of new models brings the biggest increase in efficiency.
For us AI is not a distant vision of the future but everyday reality: a tool, a new technology for automating processes and for developing entirely new types of media.
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