News at Seven
Here's something that's very freaking cool (thanks Engadget) from the InfoLab at Northwestern University:News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.
Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans.
This is still early, but it's a brilliant idea, and it uses the Half-Life 2 engine. Go here to look at the website, and go here for a video demonstration.
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