Hi All,

The new, customizable version of News at Seven is now live, free, and open to the public! Just go to NewsAtSeven.com and hit the “My News” link at the top. The system is still definitely in beta; there are bugs we know about, and we’re sure that you’ll find more. We wanted to open the system up now, though, both to help us shake out these bugs, and let everyone see what we’ve been working on.

So what have we been working on? The first thing you’ll probably notice at http://www.newsatseven.com/mynews/ is that you can finally create your own, personalized news show.

Previously, you could only see what WE thought was interesting in news that day; now, YOU decide what you want to see. If you’re a techie like us, you can stay current on gadget news. If you’re a movie buff, or in to entertainment, political, or world news, those are all options too. And, of course, we’ve also got sports news (although currently it’s limited to the NFL).

The new News at Seven is also always up-to-date. The system looks for more stories about every twenty minutes, so News at Seven is now full of breaking news. If you come back to the site in an hour or two, you will see new content.

Under the “Preferences” heading, you’ll also notice a box where you can tell us your zipcode. Currently, this is used to offer your local movie showtimes while the show is playing (more on that later), but we plan on offering a local weather forecast option soon.

Once you hit the “Generate Show” button, you will be presented with a show that was created just then, just for you. The system looks at each of your specified preferences, and finds the most up-to-date news (that you haven’t already seen) in that category. Once the system has edited, assembled, and ordered the segment, it generates the show and presents it to you. While the show is playing, you can move your mouse over the video, and click to pause or skip between segments.

You will also notice that off to the left is additional information about your show. The exact information displayed varies with the type of segment being shown, but it typically includes things like a link to the original news story, a link to the b-roll showing behind the anchors, or more information about the people and places mentioned in the story. You can also use the left “Program” bar to skip among the segments (by mousing over the pause icon next to the title and clicking.)

You can also help us out by acting as a “voice coach” for our virtual anchors. If they mispronounce a word or name, you can click the “Hear a mispronounced word?” link just beneath the show window, type in the mispronounced word and your corrected pronunciation, and hit the “Submit” button. To ensure there’s no vandalism, this isn’t an automatic process, but we will definitely go through your submissions and add them to our customized dictionary. This is not our only plan for improving the quality of the voices in the near future, but it should go a long ways towards helping the system with its speech, especially with proper nouns.

So where are we going in the future? We’re actually branching out in a few different directions. The first has to do with the personality of the anchors. This includes trying out different voices (don’t be surprised if the anchors read different stories with completely different voices in the near future), expanding the set of abbreviations that the system speaks well, and improving the anchors’ animations.

The second branch is aimed at improving the quality of the existing presentations. This includes things like tweaking the accuracy of the b-roll shown behind the anchors and ensuring that the links on the left side are relevant and interesting.

The third branch is expanding the types of news and information the system handles. We want to offer more news sources (if you have suggestions of news sites you want us to include, please let us know by following the “Contact Us” link at the top of the page), with the ultimate goal of serving up arbitrary RSS feeds.

Finally, the fourth branch is hyper-personalization. We will explore what it means to offer a news show that is truly about YOUR world, that includes not only world news and your local weather, but a new favorite band from your friend on Facebook, and a reminder of your meeting this coming afternoon.

Longtime viewers of News at Seven will probably notice that Alyx, Eli, Barney and the rest of the gang are no longer anchors. While we loved the Half-Life characters, the full 3d engine was simply too heavy for the system to ever offer personalized shows; the system used to take about 20 minutes to generate a single news story from start to finish, a process that now only takes 15-30 seconds. This means that we can offer more sources, more personalization, and keep the whole system more up-to-date with breaking news. We hope that Alyx and Eli’s fans will also love Kaitlin and Sam, our two new anchors.

We’re excited about the future of News at Seven. But we’re also really excited about where the system is now, and we hope you are too. As always, we welcome any comments, criticisms, or suggestions you have, just drop us a line by following the “Contact Us” link above, or posting a comment to the blog. We will also be announcing new features and updates to the system through this blog, so feel free to bookmark or add it to your RSS reader if you’re interested. If you want to show your friends or family a show that you’ve made, you can send them a link by simply copying and pasting the link from your browser.

Thanks for your interest, and stay tuned!

-The News at Seven Team

We are going to officially launch the News at Seven Beta on Monday, October 29th. This version will have customization, run in Flash, and be totally free. Check back in less than two weeks!

We had our first public unveiling of the new version of News at Seven at Wired NextFest last week, and it was a big success.  After only showing it internally, it was definitely gratifying to see the general public (and press) get such a kick out of the system.

We had hoped that the alpha version we demoed at the show would be available to the public on our site sometime this week.  We’ve decided to focus our attention on a beta version of the system, however.
Instead of unveiling an alpha version and saying “Imagine if the animations were better, and you could enter your zipcode, and there were more sources to choose from, and if you could see more information about the story, and…” we’re just going to do all of that, and release a beta version of the system in October (a more specific date will be coming later.)

This will be a real version of the system that will run in any web browser (as long as Flash 9 is installed) and will be updated regularly.  It will definitely not be a “final” version of the system, and will only be a beta, but we will be leaving this version up and improving it as time goes on.  A trailer for the new version will be up and running later today in the YouTube player above.
Thanks everyone for your patience and continued interest in News at Seven.  This blog is the source to watch for more News at Seven information.

Thanks again, and check back soon for more information!

Hi all,

We are officially halting production of the current version of News at Seven.  This means no new shows for the next couple of weeks.  We originally intended to keep producing weekly News at Seven shows while developing the new version, but we have had a series of issues with the Half-Life 2 engine and need to focus all of our time on getting the new version ready to show at Wired NextFest in mid-September.

We will have some very cool things to show at NextFest.  Thanks for all of your continued interest, and keep watching this space.  We will have announcements here soon.

Best,

News at Seven team

Sorry, we are having technical issues with Half-Life 2 so there won’t be a new show today.  We plan on having a new show up next Wednesday, and continue to work hard on the new version of News at Seven.  If any of you are planning on attending Wired magazine’s NextFest in September, we will have something very cool to show…

Hi all,

Some of you have noticed that the videos behind Alyx have been looping differently lately. We are currently in the midst of changing the ways that the video is processed before the show is run, and there are still some kinks to be worked out. Once everything is up and running, the videos should be much smoother and cause less “hiccuping” in our anchor’s voice as videos are loaded behind her. Until that point though, there are definitely a few bugs remaining. We considered getting the new video system completely up and running on our test system before showing it to you all, but we thought you might be interested to see the work in progress. News at Seven is always improving, and one of the benefits of being a smaller research project is that we are quickly able to share those improvements with you, our loyal viewers. We hope you’re also excited about getting to watch a fledgling project improve, and we hope you won’t mind its growing pains too much.

Thanks a lot for your continued interest (over 55,000 views on YouTube and counting!), and keep watching!

Best,

The News at Seven team

Hi everyone,

You may have noticed in the last few days that Alyx now performs animations and gestures while presenting the news.  Getting Alyx to look more lively and life-like has been a major goal of ours for awhile, and it’s nice to finally get a first pass of it in the system.

Like everything else in News at Seven, her animations are added completely automatically.  Currently, the gestures are chosen and applied by a set of hand-coded rules, and while we think they look decent currently, there is obviously a lot more work to be done in the gesture area.

We are also researching ways to automatically apply facial expressions to our anchors, and improve the human-like qualities of their voices.  We believe that the more life-like the anchors are, the more interesting they will be over extended periods of time.

On a housekeeping note, you may notice that this is the first time the blog has been updated.  While we’ve been working hard on the system over the past few months, we haven’t taken the time previously to write up for the community what we’re thinking and doing.  It’s time to rectify that, and so you can expect weekly updates to the blog.

Also, we encourage you to leave comments!  Currently, we’re leaving comment moderation on to reduce the number of spam comments.  This means that your comments won’t show up until we go through and approve it specifically.  We will do this regularly, though, so don’t worry.

If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for improving News at Seven, please don’t hesitate to email us the contact link, or leave a comment here in the blog.

Thanks, and keep watching!

The News at Seven team

Welcome to the new website. This is the place you should come for any kind of News at Seven news, press, or videos