World's first synthetic broadcaster announced

TV's first synthetic broadcaster has been built in Televirtual's Media Lab. in the form of an artificial speech engine, which is undetectable from the real thing.

Working in collaboration with Britain's top speech scientists and the BBC's weather graphic suppliers, Metra, Televirtual has given birth to METman, a virtual weather reporter and forecaster, whose entire performance is generated automatically from a few lines of text-based data issued as a meteorological summary, and accompanied by a weather map update. The cartoon-style METman, which is designed to explore and interpret the latest 3d weather maps, doesn't even need a script.

In the final application, raw facts and figures will be fed into the system, which automatically draws from a lexicon of appropriate phrases, to produce a narrative report.This text is then fed into METvoice the first ever artificial voice or TTS (Text-to-Speech) engine, to be custom-built to broadcast standards. The human vocal model for METvoice was Televirtual boss and founder, Tim Child, himself a broadcaster and former TV newsman.

Modern speech engines are created by recording up to 30 hours of dictated speech, but by capturing Tim's speaking patterns as well as words and phrases, Televirtual were able to achieve a robotic performance level unheard of to date. The new speech engine has further powerful features.

Operating as part of Televirtual's award-winning RAP animation system, METvoice features a powerful XML-style mark up language stream, triggering lip-synch animations, and controlling and dictating the 3d animated METman's moods, expressions, gestures, and screen positions.

Whilst the new voice is still being improved upon, the early results are impressive. "Unless you were aware or suspected it, you would not normally be able to detect METman's vocal performance as anything other than the real thing," said Tim. The low cost weather reporting service is initially aimed at regional and niche TV channels.

Further 'broadcast' voices are now planned, and the breakthrough is by no means limited to weather forecasting. Gaming channels and Quiz TV variants could also employ the system to operate virtual presenters in virtual sets, at a fraction of the cost of conventional presentation methods.

But the larger market for such synthetic voice and character creation applications is probably in the Home of the near Future. Installed in domestic television set top boxes (STBs), 3d 'announcers' will be able to present a personalised information service tailored to individual requirements. Such 'homecasters' would be able to advise on TV viewing schedules, read the news and weather on demand, and trawl the internet on request.

In disability scenarios, they will be able to read incoming emails to the blind, and could 'sign' to the deaf or provide lip-readable augmented information to the hard of hearing, whilst the speech-impaired might utilise them for voice messaging.

Media Network's Andy Sennitt comments: Synthetic speech technology is certainly improving in leaps and bounds. Dutch railways, NS, use it for station announcements and I doubt that many occasional users of the railway even realise it's a computer. I would hate to see human newsreaders replaced with synthetic voices, though I must admit that listeners to some local commercial stations would probably not even notice if the human presenter were suddenly replaced by a computer.

Source: Media Network

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