How to Make Lots of Web Video, Really Fast: Get Rid of (Most of) the Humans

Image copyright Rainer Plendl

Heads up, professional video makers: Robots may be coming for your jobs.

We've already seen that software can replace human beings who used to write and edit news stories. Now, Wochit, an Israeli-born startup, is trying to do the same thing with video news.

And it's quite possible that you've seen some of its work already: Wochit's stuff is running on big portals like Yahoo, and on many smaller sites, via distributors like Grab Media.

Wochit can take prewritten stories from outlets like Reuters and turn them into videos by assembling an appropriate mix of images, clips and narration. Human beings touch the video twice during production - once when a "moderator" quickly scans the clip to make sure the basic elements are in the right place, and once when someone reads the voice-over copy.

Wochit said the entire process takes an average of 10 minutes, and that lets the company make hundreds of clips a day.

The results have been getting better throughout the year. Now they're quite passable. Here's how Wochit handled a story this morning about President Obama and the Too Big to Fail banks:

No one's going to mistake this stuff for a "60 Minutes" report. But, depending on the use case, it may certainly be good enough. Wochit is aimed at Web video, where lots of people are looking for ad-friendly clips that users might also click on. But in the not-so-distant future, I can see this stuff working on conventional TV, too.

Eventually, Wochit CEO Keith McAllister said, the company wants to set up a self-service system where anyone could feed it text and get a usable video. If a brand like, um, AllThingsD wanted to add our own narration (or whatever), we could do that, too.

This is likely worrisome for some human beings who currently get paid to edit and produce news videos. But humans have been grappling with the pros and cons of automation for a long time.

And if you want to put a sunnier face on it, feel free to paraphrase my take on it when I wrote about the possibility that Narrative Science's story-writing robots might take my job: "The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do - work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can't do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway."

Here's a quick interview I conducted (but didn't edit) with McAllister last week:

Humans 1, Robots 0

Computers seem to be replacing humans across many industries, and we're all getting very nervous.

But if you want some reason for optimism, visit your local supermarket. See that self-checkout machine? It doesn't hold a candle to the humans - and its deficiencies neatly illustrate the limits of computers' abilities to mimic human skills.

The human supermarket checker is superior to the self-checkout machine in almost every way. The human is faster. The human has a more pleasing, less buggy interface. The human doesn't expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn't on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper. Best of all, the human does all the work while I'm allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being.

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Robots May Revolutionize China's Electronics Manufacturing

A new worker's revolution is rising in China and it doesn't involve humans.

With soaring wages and an aging population, electronics factory managers say the day is approaching when robotic workers will replace people on the Chinese factory floor.

A new wave of industrial robots is in development, ranging from high-end humanoid machines with vision, touch and even learning capabilities, to low-cost robots vying to undercut China's minimum wage.

Over the next five years these technologies will transform China's factories, executives say, and also fill a growing labor shortage as the country's youth become increasingly unwilling to perform manual labor. How the transformation plays out will also go a long way in deciding how much of the electronics supply chain remains in China.

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This Robotic Water Snake is Both Graceful and Utterly Terrifying

Do snakes freak you out? How about the idea of being hunted down and killed by robots either of their own accord, or on orders from someone else? If you said yes to either of those questions, chances are you'll find this video a little freaky, but enthralling nonetheless.

The little guy featured in this clip is the HiBot ACM-R5, a robotic snake designed for underwater movement, and evidentially designed quite well. There's something graceful and almost majestic about the way it twists and turns through the water, and the video's soundtrack certainly helps play up that part. By the same token though, there's something menacing about it. A robo-snake version of Jaws is way too easy to imagine. Either way, it's fascinating to watch...from all the way over here where it's safe. [IEEE Spectrum]

Diet Robot, Autom, Now Available On Indiegogo, Will Ship In Six Months

Just in time for post-holiday guilt comes Autom, the diet robot that reminds you to eat healthy, asks you how much you exercised per day, and generally sits there being judgmental as you stuff your face with pecan pie. The robot, originally announced in 2007, is coming to life thanks to an Indiegogo campaign and the help of gadget masters PCH International, a manufacturer in Shenzhen, China.

We’ve written quite a bit about Autom so far but to recap, it’s essentially a little robot that sits in your kitchen and reminds you to input the foods you’ve eaten and the exercise you’ve done. It’s friendly about it, but insistent, and in tests users have grown attached to their little kvetches, even resorting to dressing them up.

“In terms of the weight-loss coach application, Autom has been shown to be much more effective at helping someone stick with a diet as compared to doing the exact same thing on a computer, phone, or tablet screen. When we gave the trial version of Autom out to people, they talked about her like a friend or a family member after only a few weeks of having one short conversation with her every day,” said Cory Kidd, founder of Intuitive Automata and creator of Autom. “Not only that, nearly everyone named her and many people even dressed her up with things like scarves, hats, or a red feather boa!”

The partnership with PCH allows the company to ship a mere six months after the Indiegogo offer ends, a first in the crowdfunding space. The company is also creating a developers kit so users can build their own apps, controlling the motors, vision system, and speech output.

“Autom was developed based on my Ph.D. work at the MIT Media Lab where I spent six and a half years developing an understanding of the psychology of human-robot interaction and the health-related applications,” said Kidd. “In other words, I helped to figure out why talking to a robot is much more compelling than interacting with a character on a screen. In short, it’s the exact same reasons that we prefer to meet face-to-face with someone instead of talking through the phone or video conferencing — we tend to trust the person in front of us more, develop a better rapport, and feel more comfortable.”

The Indiegogo deal gets you an Autom without weight-loss coach subscription for $199. An Autom with a 1-year subscription to the service costs $249 while the dev kit costs $299. According to the site, the dev kit gives you access to:

• Low-level control of her six motors
• The camera inside her eye
• The audio and microphone for sound in and out
• Define a series of movements using XML files for her to play out on her motors
• Text-to-speech (TTS) control including markup for improving pronunciation
• Higher-level behavior control using a simple markup language that allow you to combine motor actions with text during TTS

Whether you’re trying to lose a few pounds or just need someone small and plastic to talk to, the simple fact that Autom is shipping is great news for the artisanal hardware world, and here’s hoping she helps me get rid of this spare tire, spare chin, and extra bust.

Want To Be The Robot Well You Can With BERO

We love cool robots and the BERO is a cool looking robot that started off as a wired version, but soon the designers realised that Bluetooth is cool and so now the BERO is a little robot four inch high robot, that is controlled via Bluetooth! You know that you want one, don't you?

These are the main details for the Be The Robot (BERO) Bluetooth Controlled Open Source Robot;

The initial design inspiration for BERO came from the Google Bug Droid, especially after seeing a bunch of them twitching around using servos and long wires at Maker Faire.

Wanting to improve upon things, we thought that it would be great to make a 6-motor animated robotic toy based on the Google Bug Droid. We initially thought that the Google Bug Droid design was Open Source

This project is currently going through Kickstarter, there are thirty days to go and they are about at third of the way to their target.

Source [Ubergizmo]