Artificial intelligence applied to radio news: A case study of automatic segmentation of news items at RNE

Abstract

The results of a project on news segmentation at Radio Nacional de España (RNE) carried out by the RTVE Technological Innovation and Media Management areas is presented. The aim of this project is to apply artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe and cut the news items that make up a radio news program. The main goals of this project are to increase the accessibility of the content and to allow its reusability on various platforms and social media. The project was planned in two phases, covering system configuration and service delivery. The minimum quality criteria required were defined in advance, both for automatic voice transcription and for news segmentation. For the speech-to-text process, the highest word error rate (WER) allowed was 10%, while the precision rate for the news segmentation was 85%. System performance in both transcription and segmentation was considered to be sufficient, although a higher degree of accuracy in news cutting is expected in the coming months. The results show that, despite using these quite mature technologies, adjustment and learning processes and human intervention are still necessary.