Virtual Reporters - "News at 7"

All communication and journalism students need to take a look at this .... is this the future?

This unique concept was developed by the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University .

Using a graphical gaming engine and a text-to-speech technology News at 7 is truly a smart application that"automatically generates a virtual news show" every day. "Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation."

In other words....the application roams the internet, and gathers information from various news sources and creates its own data to feed to the 3D virtual news reporter.

This is an amazing development...watch the news cast for today. A lot of times applications that use the text-to-speech technology sounds very choppy and robotic....surprisingly the speech is quite smooth.

View the archived news casts since February.....

Great case study for your students....what direction will this experimental technology go in the future?