Yesterday, Radio Ink covered Polish station Radio Piekary’s use of a new artificial-intelligence-powered personality named Basia for a weekly one-hour air shift, comparable to what Alpha Media is doing with AI Ashley in the US. What hasn’t happened in the States yet is a fully AI station – but Germany could beat American radio to the punch.
This month, Antenne Deutschland launched Europe’s first radio station completely driven by artificial intelligence, Absolut Radio AI. The currently online-only station has joined Absolut Radio’s portfolio of seven streams and six national DAB+ brands.
The station targets audiences aged 14-49 with an assortment of pop and dance music from the past decade. The radio station is underpinned by an AI voice, kAI, which discusses the music and educates listeners about AI’s potential, benefits, and constraints.
Absolut Radio’s (human) Program Director Tina Zacher spoke about kAI, saying, “kAI is a presenter in its infancy. We know that he is certainly not perfect at the beginning and that he will make one or two mistakes. I could imagine that we will soon provide kAI with a sidekick or that listeners will be able to interact with him. Everything is conceivable and possible.”
Absolut Radio AI’s entirety, inclusive of all synthetic voicetracks, is managed by the cloud-native Voicetrack.ai automation system from the German/American company Radio.Cloud. The technology and automation software used to power the streamer will be featured at IBC 2023 in Amsterdam from September 15-18.
Radio.Cloud’s CEO and Founder Christian Brenner said, “A large part of the development work goes into the software part on our site, which sends the request to ChatGPT and checks and optimizes the answer again. The platform does the workflow completely on its own. In the first few months, however, someone will always screen the texts again, and can quickly cross-read them in a view that shows all the voice tracks of each day.”
Antenne Deutschland’s management says the goal is not merely to entertain but to reach the wider public, many of whom are unfamiliar with artificial intelligence’s capabilities. Absolut Radio AI, as the name implies, is fully transparent to listeners about its nature – or lack thereof. Antenne Deutschland also pledges that no human jobs at the company are in jeopardy from the formation of the station.
But will Absolut Radio AI become the world’s first fully AI OTA station? Antenne Deutschland Managing Director Mirko Drenger said, “Anything is possible [including a switch to DAB+]. But now the program must first establish itself and prove that it is suitable for the masses.”
So, here’s another example of the listener being exposed to a “rehearsal”. My good friend George Johns used to remind me how brutal many TV productions would be without off-screen preparation. This sounds like another example of “ready, fire, aim”. Would love to know how much human input goes into this one?