From India's English language The Economic Times:
Chinese TV employs robot as weather reporter; anchors worried
For the first time, a Chinese news channel has employed an artificial intelligence robot as a weather reporter on its live breakfast show, raising concerns among the country's journalists as it could threaten their jobs.
"I'm happy to start my new work on the winter solstice," robot XiaoIce said during her debut on Tuesday morning.
XiaoIce is actually a piece of software developed by Microsoft using smart cloud and big data.
In the first two days of her work, XiaoIce impressed many with her cute voice. She also comments on big news events on Shanghai Dragon TV.
According to Microsoft, breakthroughs in text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI) have helped XiaoIce score high points for linguistic naturalness, and hers is closer to the human voice than other speech synthesizers.
Through unique emotional technology, she can make comments instantly based on weather data.
Paging Ron Burgundy, Mr. Ron Burgundy to the white courtesy phone please...
I find it odd that people would want to have an AI read them the news when they could read it just as easily themselves and skip over segments that do not interest them. It would be fun to play with an English language version of this software.
When I worked for MSFT back in 2000, I wanted to take a couple months off and just wander the halls asking what people were doing...
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