Hai Xiaotang at the World Intelligence Congress [Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Tianjin University has unveiled an AI-based news broadcaster, the first of its kind in Chinese colleges, at the third World Intelligence Congress held from May 16 to 19 in the northern coastal city of Tianjin.

The artificial news presenter, named Hai Xiaotang, was created in collaboration with Huiyan Tech based on end-to-end deep learning speech synthesis technology, said Wang Longbiao, a professor from the College of Intelligence and Computing at Tianjin University.

“We developed a set of sound teaching materials and asked a female news presenter at the university to train it to speak,” said Wang.

Wang said the artificial news presenter has already surpassed its teacher. In a 2,000-word competition, it presented news in a natural and fluent way without any mistakes while its human rival stumbled twice with her lines.

The results come from Tianjin University’s good foundation and strengths in cognitive computing, speech signal processing, machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, computer vision and natural language processing, all of which are related to artificial intelligence.