BNT launches a robot to read out the news to its audience

From today (December 23, 2020), the news on the website of the Bulgarian National Television and in the application BNT NEWS can be not only read but also listened to.

This is made possible by an artificial intelligence technology, which converts text into speech. The synthetic voice reads out the articles from the website.

The completely new tool "Text to Speech", which is integrated in the platforms bntnews.bg and BNT NEWS allows people to hear the news, with the help of the voice of a robot that will read everything for you.

"Consumers of online news are increasingly busy and easily distracted. In addition, they are increasingly reading the news on mobile devices. The smaller screens strain their eyesight, " said Borislav Choranov, the Head of Multimedia department at the Bulgarian National Television.

"In our opinion, the opportunity to listen to the news while letting you go with other things at the same time is a very useful service and brings convenience to readers. At a later stage, we plan to add an option to compile playlists, for example - users can listen to all the news from a certain day in categories."

The innovation has only recently come into use in Bulgarian language

The software is an artificial intelligence technology and allows personalized voice model to be trained, using own studio-quality audio recordings to create a unique voice.

The robot, reading out the articles on the news site of the Bulgarian National Television - bntnews.bg and on the mobile application BNT NEWS, is to be trained to recognize various abbreviations in Bulgarian, as well as popular foreign words.

The team that implemented the technology expects the robot to become more intuitive and will be developed to bring more and more convenience to users. Listening to news is fully compatible with various devices, can be easily transferred to a TV, car, Bluetooth headset and more.

The voice helps by reading out articles loud while you are busy with other things like cooking, driving, playing sports or just your hands and eyes are busy with other activities.

Visit www.bntnews.bg now! Download the BNT NEWS app for free with custom news notification options!

The innovation of reading news with the help of a robot is part of the Bulgarian National Television's effort to facilitate access to its quality content and news.

During the year the Bulgarian National Television updated its main sites and launched the information mobile application BNT NEWS. In the past year, the number of new users of the news content of the public service broadcaster on the Internet has increased by 74%, and through various projects such as the Bulgarian National Television Podcast, the new functionality "Text to Speech" and more multimedia content in digital channels, the Bulgarian National Television reaches an ever-widening audience.