Slides by Dmitry Shishkin for news:rewired 'video focus' on 16 March

1. Auto-translation, synthetic
voices and virtual voiceover in
news production
Dmitry Shishkin, Digital Development Editor,
BBC World Service, @dmitryshishkin
News: Rewired, London, March 2016

3. 90 million
unique visitors made November 2015 a record month for
WS language sites

4. 42 million
unique visitors made November 2012 – we’ve grown
100% in 3 years

5. 1 billion
more people will be online by 2020 – coming mainly
from Africa, Middle East and Asia – all on mobile
phones
Source: Benedict Evans, A16z

7. How does it actually work end to end?

8. OK, but how do English language voices sound?

9.  Computer assisted translation
 Text to speech voice synthesis
 Editorial considerations, audience
feedback
3 key areas to analyse

10. Computer assisted translation

11.  Google Translate: not perfect, but
workable, a good starting point
 Positives: good with names,
geographical and personal
 Limitations: word order, morphology,
no cultural awareness
Computer assisted translation

12. Text to speech synthesis

13.  Single editor produces multiple
voices = scalability
 Voices are actually very good and
getting better
 Editors are not dependant on studios
and recoding equipment
Text to speech synthesis

14.  Incredible pushback to start with,
‘robots invasion’, quality acceptance
later on
 Overwhelmingly positive reaction
from Japanese users
 Russian next, to be followed by
Spanish, Portuguese, Korean
Editorial considerations, audience feedback

15. Editorial considerations, audience feedback
 “I had no idea this kind of thing existed. I got a
real sense of the future. I have just one word:
…awesome!”
 “As I can't speak English, I've been waiting for a
site like this. I know it's a computer voice, but
it's easy to understand, so thank you”
 “It would be great if you could display the
original English text, while the voices read in
Japanese”

16. Thank you – any questions?
Dmitry Shishkin, Digital Development Editor,
BBC World Service, @dmitryshishkin
News: Rewired, London, March 2016