This paper proposes the building of Xiaomingbot, an intelligent, multilingual and multimodal software robot equipped with four integral capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. Its system summarizes Chinese news that it automatically generates from data tables. Next, it translates the summary or the full article into multiple languages, and reads the multilingual rendition through synthesized speech. Notably, Xiaomingbot utilizes a voice cloning technology to synthesize the speech trained from a real person's voice data in one input language. The proposed system enjoys several merits: it has an animated avatar, and is able to generate and read multilingual news. Since it was put into practice, Xiaomingbot has written over 600,000 articles, and gained over 150,000 followers on social media platforms.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.08005,
title = {Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter},
author = {Runxin Xu and Jun Cao and Mingxuan Wang and Jiaze Chen and Hao Zhou and Ying Zeng and Yuping Wang and Li Chen and Xiang Yin and Xijin Zhang and Songcheng Jiang and Yuxuan Wang and Lei Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.08005},
year = {2020}
}