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Fearne and Kate present television programmes for a living. But there's a new generation of high tech television presenters waiting in the wings... |
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This is a computer generated character. How is she different from the sort of characters you see in Toy Story? Well, films like that are animated very precisely over a long period of time. |
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Whereas this character works in real time. This means that she can react to what's being said, and the things that happen around her. |
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The technology used to design the character allows anyone's face to be incorporated. That's why she resembles Kate. |
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Fearne's job's safe, though. For starters, this character isn't real, in fact she's really just a computer generated puppet. |
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Take a look at the other side of the studio, and you see that the real Kate is controlling the character. She's providing and the major movements, but the head jerks and eye blinks are pre-programmed. |
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The character has no intelligence. Kate has to listen for her, and she can't speak until Kate speaks. Kate's provides her own voice through a microphone, and the computer changes the character's lip movements accordingly. |
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She's a high tech piece of wizardry - but she's just a puppet! |
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Virtual characters have presented TV programmes in the past, but they require a performer like Fearne or Kate to operate them, otherwise they're completely lifeless. |
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This is Peter. He's a computer program with his own artificial intelligence. You can talk to him and he'll talk back! |
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He's like a robot. He uses artificial intelligence - he hears using a speech recogniser and talks using a speech synthesiser. He's quite special because he can understand language and work out how to reply all by himself. |
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But he doesn't know everything. He's an expert on himself and the way he works but, just like a human, he has to learn about things before he can talk about them. |
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The main advantages of using Peter are a presenter are that he never gets tired, he never gets bored, he never gets hungry and he doesn't get paid! |
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Fearne's job is still safe. Characters like Peter are very useful on the internet, where they're used to provide information on different subjects. |
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