The idea of a virtual anchor was pioneered >10 years ago by a group at the Northwestern CS Department including Kris Hammond. The project was called "News at Seven." This video shows the later iterations of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3MRkFYM9Q4
IIRC the early version around 2005 or 2006 used the Half Life 2 engine, so you would have Alyx Vance reading the news with a gun strapped to her belt. At the time I remember thinking that this would be great when the customization options were enabled, as you could just get the news you want instead of the stuff you don't care about that takes up most newscasts today, as well as preferred visual and voice skins to handle the narration.
As someone who worked in broadcast news, I can say that most anchors do nothing more than reading from a script so this type of task is perfectly suited to replacement by a bot or AI or whatever you want to call it. Where it fails is the "banter" format that many U.S. local newscasts use and the ad hoc interviews that local and national anchors conduct with reporters in the field.
That was me! I came here to comment some version of "Ahem, we were doing this in 2005 at Northwestern" and seeing your comment to the same effect made me super happy. Thanks for noticing and remembering!
> The idea of a virtual anchor was pioneered >10 years ago
I can cite an earlier example, perhaps?
Back around '98 I was part of a 3d game project that had a dynamic news reader that moved his lips in accordance with a wav file being played. So, although 'not AI', it did do a realtime FFA on the waveform and 'guestimate' the shape of the mouth based on significant frequencies. Analysis of volume in the wav would trigger other movements (rocking backward), or increasing pitch might trigger eyebrow movements, etc. I recall that the 'wav' itself was stitched together from multiple wav snippets at runtime to give an accurate account of the game play that had just happened.
At the end of it all, it definitely satisfied the 'virtual anchor' as described here, and was all achieved with simple heuristics.
That said, I think I would've enjoyed being part of the virtual anchor team in the video.
Former newsman here, too. And I remember staying on the air for 12, 24, 36 hours or more with no commercials during breaking news (hurricanes, flooding, etc...), and it's not something any AI will be up to in our lifetimes.
That's covered by the ad hoc interviews, which may be for breaking news or the live shot from a pending hurricane zone or something more mundane like a reporter outside the courtroom recapping a verdict from earlier in the day.
What could happen in these cases is there is some sort of "live desk" staffed by someone from the reporting staff when the need arises. Or, rethink the way breaking news is covered altogether ... does it really need a handoff back to an anchor?
Yes. While the anchor reads on-air, there are dozens of people behind the scenes doing other things. Some journalistic, some technical. All necessary and frenzied.
This isn't really the right medium to describe it all, though. During a serious news event, it can be quite the madhouse. I've never seen a Hollywood film that really captured it.
IIRC the early version around 2005 or 2006 used the Half Life 2 engine, so you would have Alyx Vance reading the news with a gun strapped to her belt. At the time I remember thinking that this would be great when the customization options were enabled, as you could just get the news you want instead of the stuff you don't care about that takes up most newscasts today, as well as preferred visual and voice skins to handle the narration.
As someone who worked in broadcast news, I can say that most anchors do nothing more than reading from a script so this type of task is perfectly suited to replacement by a bot or AI or whatever you want to call it. Where it fails is the "banter" format that many U.S. local newscasts use and the ad hoc interviews that local and national anchors conduct with reporters in the field.