Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter
This addresses the need for efficient, multilingual news dissemination for media organizations and audiences, though it is incremental as it combines existing technologies like summarization, translation, and voice cloning.
The paper tackles the problem of automated multilingual news reporting by building Xiaomingbot, a software robot that generates, translates, and reads news with an animated avatar, resulting in over 600,000 articles written and 150,000 followers gained.
This paper proposes the building of Xiaomingbot, an intelligent, multilingual and multimodal software robot equipped with four integral capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. Its system summarizes Chinese news that it automatically generates from data tables. Next, it translates the summary or the full article into multiple languages, and reads the multilingual rendition through synthesized speech. Notably, Xiaomingbot utilizes a voice cloning technology to synthesize the speech trained from a real person's voice data in one input language. The proposed system enjoys several merits: it has an animated avatar, and is able to generate and read multilingual news. Since it was put into practice, Xiaomingbot has written over 600,000 articles, and gained over 150,000 followers on social media platforms.