The Reuters Institute has launched a short podcast series how AI will affect the future of radio. Episodes will be released through this month.
The AI and the Future of Audio series explores how different broadcasters are using AI in novel ways.
Over five episodes, Reuters journalist Gretel Kahn speaks with different players in the field of broadcasting about their experiments using AI in their newsrooms and what comes next. The podcast focuses on looking at the future of broadcasting and audio while not getting lost in the AI hype.
Kahn is a Panamanian journalist. Before joining the Institute’s editorial team, she worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Episode one focuses on April 27 2023, a day when artificial intelligence completely took over a radio station in francophone Switzerland called RTS Couleur 3. The voices were AI clones of their real hosts, everything they said were scripts generated by AI, and even the music played was aggregated and composed by AI.
In the opening episode Kahn speaks with thh head of digital content at Czech Radio Anna Vošalíková to explore what it sounds like when AI meets human creativity via the Digital Writer project by Czech public broadcaster Czech Radio.
Station head, Antoine Multone told Kahn that the cloned voices were the most impressive part:
It was a normal day at Couleur 3. We had all the same shows and the same people speaking. The only thing that was a bit strange was that the people speaking were not speaking exactly the same way. It was a bit different from the radio you heard on the day before. You knew there was something strange, but the voices were the same, the content was the same. We didn’t say a lot at that time.
On that day, we waited a bit to see how the audience reacted and then we announced it at noon. We said, ‘OK, we are doing an experiment. Every voice was cloned and every text was generated by AI.’
Some in our audience said: ‘That was strange’, ‘Bring the humans back.’ But many also said: ‘It’s really impressive what you can do now.’ So we went on for the whole day talking with our community and experimenting with AI radio. The voices were clones and sometimes the music as well was partially generated by AI. We had three steps: the cloned [voices], the text generated by AI, and the music.
After experimenting with AI for a year, Multone says the station uses AI for a lot of tasks. It helps with live transcription and with tagging content. The station is using it to distribute our content in a better way.
“We use it to go faster and we use it to do things that we don’t have time to do… AI is the new thing and we have to know how to use it. We have to still be interested, still try to understand the possibilities, and try to innovate with these technologies and keep the trust with our audience.”
All episodes will be available here as they are released over the coming month.
