Robot News Anchor
Two robots stood at an anchor desk in Beijing and read the news to a hall of delegates. Xinhua calls them the world's first bionic humanoid news anchors. The female of the pair, Xinyan, greeted the room and delivered the opening report at a forum on artificial intelligence and Chinese modernisation, staged inside the World Media Summit.
Xinhua built the two with UBTECH Robotics, the Shenzhen company behind some of China's best known humanoid machines, and the agency says it holds full intellectual property rights to both. Interesting Engineering reports that they are life sized and that the male anchor is named Xinyu. Zhang Yimou, the film director, came in as chief image designer, with a brief that was less about building a convincing mannequin than about borrowing the manner of a television presenter.
The anchors do not write their own copy. They draw from Xinhua Yudian, an agency agent for current affairs news that went live earlier this year, and return vetted reporting while the broadcast is running. And that link is the claim Xinhua pushes hardest, with the agency saying the arrangement keeps output traceable, secure and controllable, while UBTECH founder Zhou Jian says live retrieval is what stops a generative model inventing facts on air.
UBTECH supplied the body and the control stack behind it. That covers bionic skin, the operating system, an emotion driven language model and the hardware that lets a machine act in a room, which the company says it builds and assembles itself. Xinhua adds that the robots carry a UBTECH multimodal model for continuous conversation in several languages, with long context and long memory, the features an on stage interview or a guided tour would need.
The agency has been careful about the job description. Qian Tong, who heads Xinhua's new media centre, described the anchors as a new role in the newsroom rather than a new star, and said they will help with presentation, multilingual output and live interaction with an audience. Reporters and editors, he said, keep the reporting, the verification and the decision on what runs.
Where the robots will actually work is still a plan rather than a schedule. But the list is wide, taking in museums and cultural venues, education, government services, outreach overseas and what Xinhua calls frontier exploration. None of those settings has a date, and the agency has given no price, production run or broadcast slot.
This is not the agency's first machine presenter. Xinhua startled newsrooms roughly eight years ago with a digital anchor stitched together from composites of a human face and given a synthesised voice, an avatar whose mouth moved on one side and whose expressions barely changed. The difference this time is that the face is a physical object on a stage, carried by a body that can walk out, turn its head and hold a hall.
For the region's hardware industry, the interesting parts are the ones that are hard to fake. Bionic skin, lip sync and expression control are what make a humanoid read as human at close range, and only a small number of firms can ship all three in one machine. A state broadcaster's stage is an unforgiving testbed for that work, with fixed lighting, long takes and an audience close enough to notice a stiff jaw.
There is an awkward question inside the arrangement. Xinhua owns the robots, the news agent and the archive the robots speak from, so the presenter and the source of what it says sit under one roof. And the agency's own framing, that the anchors assist rather than author, leans on editors holding that line in practice, since nothing in the hardware enforces it.
The pair made their first appearance before delegates from 112 countries and territories, and Xinhua says the next step is to put them in front of the public in museums, schools and government buildings. The judgement from here will be made on the face.
Xinhua and UBTECH built two life sized bionic anchors, Xinyan and Xinyu, and put them on stage at a summit forum in Beijing.
Xinhua says it owns the intellectual property and that the robots assist editors rather than replace them.
Content comes from the Xinhua Yudian news agent, which the agency says keeps output traceable and limits hallucination risk.
Five future settings are named, from museums to overseas outreach, with no deployment date or price given.
Source: Interesting Engineering, Xinhua
