Virtual newscaster hosts News At Seven

Thanks to the absolute success of the Engadget snarkbot -- that not only launches site spin-offs willy nilly, but serves us tiny sandwiches and mixed drinks when it's not busting out posts -- other media outlets are of course attempting to imitate our success. The latest such foray, News At Seven, is looking pretty hot. The completely virtual news show automatically gleans news from the web, supplements the info with blogger commentary and mixes in related images and video. It then uses a text-to-speech system and a lovable virtual newscaster to generate a video of the news with the Half-Life 2 engine. The three minute show is surprisingly entertaining and informative, even though it's in its early stages of development, and the show developers at the Northwestern University Infolab are hoping to develop the system into a full-blown evening news show replacement, which can be customized to the viewer's interests. While flesh and blood newscasters should be shaking in their boots, loyal Engadget readers should have no fear -- snarkbot 2.0 is on the way, and its automated development team tells us it's going to be quite snazzy.

[Via Fimoculous]

[Calleja @ Oct 4th 2006 11:54AM]

Where's the link so we can check this out?

[Gaz @ Oct 4th 2006 12:00PM]

Is this not Alex from HL2?

[DarkFader @ Oct 5th 2006 8:01AM]

Not Alex, but Alyx :)
Alex is from Breakdown.

[Michael @ Oct 4th 2006 12:11PM]

"The show developers at the Northwestern University Infolab are hoping to develop the system into a full-blown evening news show replacement, which can be customized to the viewer's interests."

I should stop watching Pokemon. That line made me think of this quote by Brock:
For some people, summer means playing at the beach. But for me, it means bikinis and girls to wear them!" (or something like that =P)

"Customized" to my interests? I'd like one of the girls from Love Hina to read me the Engadget news. ^~

[Jim @ Oct 4th 2006 12:12PM]

You can definitely hear the text-to-speech in the newscaster and it seems pretty run of the mill - until Alex whips out the pistol about 2 minutes in...hilarious

http://infolab.northwestern.edu/#projects/40---projects

[Marc @ Oct 4th 2006 12:20PM]

Go Cats!

[holycow90 @ Oct 4th 2006 12:37PM]

Awesome - when will virtual naked news get released?

[Patrick @ Oct 4th 2006 1:09PM]

Obviously in its early stage - the phrase "war-torn" produced a map of Palestine whereas the story was aout Darfur. But one can definitely see where this can go. Katie Couric cash out now.

[AndrewNeo @ Oct 4th 2006 1:10PM]

The thing you missed was that this is all done in-engine, I think the text-to-speech may be realtime built as a mod into the game. Facial generation done real-time with it.

[Mero @ Oct 4th 2006 1:18PM]

"Thanks to the absolute success of the Engadget snarkbot -- that not only launches site spin-offs willy nilly, but serves us tiny sandwiches and mixed drinks when it's not busting out posts -- other media outlets are of course attempting to imitate our success."

Are you for real? Only you MORONS would believe that peole will IMITATE you, 80% of your post are from asian products not available in the US or UK.

You really have gone mad

and the only thing you were right is about you launching spin-off sites all willy nilly, using the same pictures, same posts, same words, same titles.

CRAZY MORONS

[Joshuah @ Oct 4th 2006 1:19PM]

All in all, the show was pretty good on informing about current events that are taking place. The quick run through of video clip and moving background kept me interested in watching the news instead of having to constantly look as somebody's face w/ just a square in the background flashing a picture. The only problem that I made out in the program was the T.T.S. system. This distracted me from the show a bit because it just didn't flow and I cringed as I heard some easy words mispronounced. Other than that, the clip was good.

[Nate @ Oct 4th 2006 1:22PM]

Hi, my name is Nate Nichols and I'm one of the two grad students working on this project. It is done all in-game, and it is a (small) HL2 mod. The only changes to HL2 are the movie-playing/image-showing material and some tweaks to the camera code.
Everything is generated automatically. The system starts with a couple news stories, to which it finds/processes/adds images and movies. It then processes the text for the text-to-speech engine (expanding abbreviations, etc.) It also finds a high-affect, relevant blog about the story. It then runs the speech through a TTS engine and modifies the output WAV files to include HL2's lipsyncing information. Finally, the system reads in templated .VCDs (HL2's scripting files, created in FacePoser), modifies them to include the right sound files, image timings, etc., and saves them back out. It also tweaks and recompiles the map if it needs to (you can specify which anchor is speaking, etc.)
It runs properly in-game, but we use Fraps to dump it out to video.
Please email me (or post here) if you have any questions!
Thanks,
[e-mail]

[Ian Jardine @ Oct 4th 2006 1:42PM]

Nate,
Well done, a neat project.

[Todd @ Oct 4th 2006 2:40PM]

Very cool. It would be nice if they could enable captioning for those of us with hearing disabilities. It shouldn�t be too hard if they're using text to speech.

[Russ @ Oct 4th 2006 3:06PM]

Ananova (a British media company) tried to build one of these back in 2000. The idea is that you would create an account and specify what types of news and other content interested you and then their software would mechanically edit together a newscast that the virtual Ananova newscaster would read to you. Basically it would be like a completely customized version of CNN Headline news. For the launch they created just one standard newscast a day that anyone could watch as a video. From what I could tell, this turned out to be so much work that they gave up the idea of mechanically edited custom newscasts. Hope these guys succeed.

[Nate @ Oct 5th 2006 9:29AM]

Nate here again. We are actually working on adding closed captioning; Source has a nice system for that, and you're right, since it's all TTS it should be pretty straightforward to have ths system write out the appropriate text files for Source's CC system.
Unfortunately, the mod isn't ready to be released yet. We want it out in the real world, though, and we're working very hard to try and figure out the best way to get the system deployed to the public. Thanks!

[Paul @ Oct 5th 2006 7:21PM]

Nate, you so have to publicly release this mod ASAP.

[Otto @ Oct 16th 2006 11:31PM]

Okay, 1: This is pretty cool. I can't believe people actually did this, a real great job to all who worked on it...

And 2: Please stop spelling the name 'Alyx' like 'alex' to all those who don't know how to spell. Other than that, you did a real good job of this, this is really intertaining for the Half-Life fans. Thank you very much.