AI is reshaping the radio and broadcasting industry by streamlining workflows, enhancing accessibility and generating new forms of content. While it is creating new opportunities for journalists, trust and responsibility remain an integral part of these innovations.
Michael Thielen, CGI Vice-President, Consulting Services - Media Solutions, oversees CGI dira—our radio broadcasting playout and production solution—and plays a key role in advancing our AI-driven workflows for non-linear planning and production. Recently, he shared how CGI is deploying AI in radio and why trustworthiness is non-negotiable.
We offer several media solutions. The first is dira, where AI manages audio and related files to support journalists with creating their on-air material. The other is OpenMedia Classic, a newsroom system that journalists use to gather information. With both solutions, AI assists in researching, reviewing news wires and internet content, and writing text.
ChatGPT was the first big breakthrough of generative AI, ushering in new ways to generate content and solve production challenges. Prior to that, CGI was already using AI for purposes such as speech-to-text transcription, a small revolution in itself, making audio archives more accessible. This meant journalists could search for materials more easily, versus having to transcribe audio content manually.
Additionally, by revolutionizing the market, GenAI expanded what is possible for journalists. It generates content in multiple languages while creating articles in different styles and tones.
“For many of our customers, their brands are among their most important business assets. They need to protect that reputation,” says Thielen.
We use AI for automatic audio enhancement to help journalists improve the quality of problematic recordings faster and easier. We also provide artificial voices that can generate a presenter’s voice in full or mimic their voices. This can be helpful if there is an urgent traffic problem or public health announcement. If a presenter is not available, the AI tool can quickly bring these stories to listeners with synthesized AI voices.
We are also testing the ability to generate different types of content based on the format and tone of a given station. Does the presenter need to have a serious or cheerful tone? Commercial stations, in particular, may be interested in these kinds of options.
To support accessibility, we partnered with a company that provides live transcriptions. Deaf or hard of hearing individuals can now follow radio programs through live subtitling in multiple languages.
These transcription services also generate large amounts of text, which we store in our dira system—creating a time-stamped record of what happened on the radio program. AI can then generate analytics about the on-air content. This can be used for music reporting, advertising analysis, or news stories. Furthermore, broadcasters can analyze competitor programs as well as their own without having to engage an external agency to transcribe the radio programs.
Despite the fascination these technologies generate, it is important to step back and ask about the unintended consequences of AI. For instance, most of the AI-generated social media content is not labeled as such, making it hard to know what is real. As trust is paramount in the broadcast industry, these are questions broadcasters must weigh.
Broadcasters need to remain vigilant about privacy and compliance. When relying on third-party models from major tech companies, what happens to the data? Could it be used for further training? How do you ensure that language models remain unbiased and ethical? While not unique to AI, it is important to understand where cloud data is stored and how it is used.
By implementing AI into CGI’s radio production suite, our goal is to build workflows that help journalists and content creators be more effective and efficient, and to free them from repetitive tasks. We firmly believe that content created with AI should go through human review. It is important for broadcasters to continue being trusted voices within the media industry.
Thielen adds, “But in our way of thinking, everything that’s done with AI should go through the eyes of a real person who will read and approve it. We think it’s important that broadcasters continue to be seen as trusted advisors, as trustworthy people. For many of our customers, their brands are among their most important business assets. They need to protect that reputation, and they can only do it if there is a human in the loop.”
*This article is adapted from Michael Thielen’s conversation with Radio World.
