Auto-translation, synthetic voices and virtual voiceover in news productionDmitry Shishkin, Digital Development Editor, BBC World Service, @dmitryshishkin

News: Rewired, London, March 2016

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

42 millionunique visitors made November 2012 – we’ve grown 100% in 3 years

1 billionmore people will be online by 2020 – coming mainly from Africa, Middle East and Asia – all on mobile phones

Source: Benedict Evans, A16z

How does it actually work end to end?

OK, but how do English language voices sound?

Computer assisted translation

Text to speech voice synthesis

Editorial considerations, audience feedback

3 key areas to analyse

Computer assisted translation

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

Text to speech synthesis

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

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

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”

Thank you – any questions?

Dmitry Shishkin, Digital Development Editor, BBC World Service, @dmitryshishkin

News: Rewired, London, March 2016