Gabriele, the Artificial Intelligence that RTVE will use to cover the May 28 elections

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The direction of RTVE Technological Strategy has launched and leads a project for the use of new technologies based on Artificial intelligence (IA) for the generation of written and sound content, in real time and automatically, of the local elections of May 28 and in which the coverage of the nearly 5,000 municipalities is given of Spain that have less than 1,000 inhabitants.

To guarantee the veracity and precision of the information, the news, available on the web www.rtveia.eswill be generated with electoral results obtained from official sources, such as the Ministry of the Interior.

The Artificial intelligence be present in the reading of data, the writing of text, the informative structure, the generation of images and the creation of synthetic voices. The entire process carried out with technologies, as well as decisions about content and quality, has constant supervision by professionals from different areas of RTVEboth engineers, technicians or journalists, and the institutions and companies involved.

This test, focused on the least populated localities of our countrycould be expanded to offer full coverage since the system is capable of generating results from all, 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 means- it is not possible to provide”. 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 informatively complement 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 initiativesamong many other possibilities currently in the exploration phase.

Another function is “assist the work of RTVE professionals 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 RTVE explanation.

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”, assures the Public Corporation.

For this project, RTVE has relied on the technology and experience of the Spanish company Narrative. Based on the data provided by official information sources, its Artificial Intelligence technology, “Gabriele”is capable of interpreting them and transforming them into an informative text.

News include a headline with the winning political party (by number of votes) and in what population it has been, varying its structure so that not all the holders are very homogeneous in style. A subheading collects the highlights of parties and votes or the result in the locality. In the body of the news, with the scrutiny already finished, counts which match was considered the winner (for having obtained the majority of the votes of the locality), how the rest of the parties have been, how many votes has each formation obtained (in quantity and percentage) or the participation in this day and compared with the previous one, among others common data or graphics such as images, maps, parliamentary arcs or “pactometers”.

This process, created automatically with natural language text, 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 author, 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 carried out, in collaboration with the University of Granada and the RTVE-UGR Chair and with the support of the Amazon-Alexa 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 Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant.

“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 most 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 information content to people with disabilities, without excessive digital skills or 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 answers by text and voice, now yes, with the synthetic version. In addition, it is multimodal, not only is the information 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, they will be published, also as evidence, images created by some of the best known generative artificial intelligence tools.

The entire process runs in the “cloud”. Practically 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 the intensive and flexible use of resources at certain times that allow, with full reliability, to delegate the management of this infrastructure so that the work team focuses on generating creative ideas and ensuring the highest possible quality of content.

In this test, the first of those carried out that will be made openly available to the public, The University of Castilla la Mancha participatesthrough a specific agreement signed last February with RTVE, contributing their academic knowledge and experience in the field of journalism and the application of new technologies.