BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Deutsche Welle (DW) is experimenting with AI voices for its TV program. "We are testing the use of synthetic voices," program director Nadja Scholz told Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Berlin. Voices generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) could be used for trailers or program bridges - i.e. previews between two shows in the TV program. It is not about presenting programs. "We want to free up our journalists for tasks such as research, contextualization and analysis," added the programme director of the German foreign broadcaster.

For short videos for social media platforms, especially the tech format "Shift", they even experimented with whether avatars - i.e. artificial figures - could be used as video hosts. There it would fit the content and viewers would clearly recognize that it was not human. Again, this is not about hosting entire programs, but about individual video clips. The "Shift" format deals with life in the digital world.

In the video area, for example, it is also being tested whether artificial intelligence can create image or video sequences from raw material that could serve as the basis for program contributions, according to Deutsche Welle.

Scholz, who has been program director of the public broadcaster Deutsche Welle since 2023, also said: "We have been working with AI for several years because we have 32 program languages. We have been using AI for automated translation for a long time because it saves us a huge amount of time."

AI usually refers to applications based on machine learning, in which software searches through data sets for matches and draws conclusions. Media companies are increasingly experimenting with this./rin/DP/men