RTVE's Technological Strategy Department has launched and is leading a project to use new technologies based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the generation of written and sound content, in real time and automatically, for the local elections of 28 May and in which the coverage of the nearly 5,000 municipalities in Spain with less than 1,000 inhabitants will be given.
To guarantee the veracity and precision of the information, the news, available on the website www.rtveia.es, will be generated with electoral results obtained from official sources, such as the Ministry of the Interior.
Artificial Intelligence will be present in data reading, text writing, information structure, image generation and the creation of synthetic voices. The entire process carried out with technologies, as well as decisions about content and quality, is constantly supervised by professionals from different areas of RTVE, both engineers, technicians and journalists, and from the institutions and companies involved.
This test, focused on the least populated towns in our country, could be expanded to offer full coverage since the system is capable of generating results from all of them, from the smallest to large cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or Zaragoza.
The system, aimed at creating content for rural or less populated Spain and that it meets accessibility requirements, "offers a service that -with traditional media- cannot be provided." says RTVE, and can be used to cover regional, national or European elections as long as the necessary official data is available.
For any of them, having this resource makes it possible to supplement traditional coverage by providing information for analysis such as the distribution of votes, changes or not in political tendencies, support for national or regional parties or particular initiatives, among many other possibilities today. in exploration phase.
Another function is to "assist the work of RTVE professionals by creating a first version on which to work or so that they can carry out more creative or personal work, leaving tedious and routine tasks an occupation for the machines", adds the explanation of RTVE.
The information and content covered are not, in quantity or detail, those that are usually covered by RTVE information professionals. "Now it can be generated in a matter of minutes, improving the quantity and quality of the information dedicated to the elections," says the Public Corporation.
For this project, RTVE has relied on the technology and experience of the Spanish company Narrativa. Based on the data provided by official information sources, its Artificial Intelligence technology, "Gabriele", is capable of interpreting it and transforming it into an informative text.
The news includes a headline with the winning political party (by number of votes) and in which population it has been, varying its structure so that all headlines are not very homogeneous in style. A subtitle collects the highlights of parties and votes or the result in the town. In the body of the news, with the scrutiny already finished, the party considered as the winner is told (for having obtained the majority of the votes in the locality), how the rest of the parties have been, how many votes each has obtained training (in quantity and percentage) or participation in this day and compared with the previous one, among other data or usual graphics such as images, maps, parliamentary arches or "pactometers".
This process, created automatically with text in natural language, has always been and is trained and supervised by professionals from different areas of RTVE to "certify and verify its informative, editorial and visual quality". So that no one has doubts about the authorship, and to promote transparency, in each publication it is reflected that: "The content of this news has been automatically generated by artificial intelligence from the data provided by the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Spain ".
For the creation of synthetic voices, the chosen company, also Spanish, has been Monoceros Labs. Work has been done, in collaboration with the University of Granada and the RTVE-UGR chair and with the support of the Amazon-Alexa team in Spain, with two voices for the narration of the news that will be heard on the Web and in Alexa, one male and one female, and a third female for the dialogue in the voice application RTVE Elections Artificial Intelligence of the virtual assistant Alexa from Amazon.
"They are unique and personalized voices in style and timbre since they are, thanks to generative AI, a mixture of people's voices and their characteristics, something that is unusual and that is hardly being done in Spanish because it is the usual and more available , synthetic voices cloned from humans", explains the public entity.
These voices will be in charge of "reading" the texts and favoring the accessibility of the informative content to people with disabilities, without excessive digital skills or for them to be heard on smart devices.
Beyond the synthetic voice, the Alexa Skill is conversational AI with voice recognition, capable of understanding people's requests and the context of the conversation and giving responses by text and voice, now with the synthetic version . In addition, it is multimodal, not only the information is received by voice, it can also be seen on a screen. To explore this information, those with Alexa or an Echo device just have to say: "Alexa, open elections artificial intelligence."
In addition to images of the towns from the RTVE documentary collections or recordings from Territorial Centers, images created by some of the best-known generative artificial intelligence tools will also be published as evidence.
The entire process runs in the "cloud". Almost the entire process of automatic content creation is carried out in the "cloud" and, in this context, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides its support and technologies to guarantee the success of this project by offering the necessary solutions for intensive use. and flexible resources at specific times that allow, with full reliability, to delegate the management of this infrastructure so that the work team can focus on generating creative ideas and guaranteeing the highest possible quality of content.
The University of Castilla la Mancha participates in this test, the first of those carried out that will be made available to the public, through a specific agreement signed last February with RTVE, contributing its academic knowledge and experience in the field of journalism and the application of new technologies.
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