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New Russian robot news anchor sends cold shivers down spine of budding presenters

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New Russian robot news anchor sends cold shivers down spine of budding presenters

The recent unveiling of an impressive A.I.-enabled virtual newsreader in China will likely have sent shivers down the spine of many an anchor who’d been hoping for a long and illustrious career in the business, Digital Trends reports.

Further bafflement will have arisen inside the news-reading community this week after Russian state news channel Russia-24 unveiled yet another effort at automating news shows by showcasing a robot news anchor.

It’s fair to say that the robot, developed by tech firm Promobot in the city of Perm about 700 miles east of Moscow, still needs some work — a fact that will give renewed hope to presenters keen to stay in front of the camera for a while yet.

According to the Digital Trends, the robot, Alex, is modeled on the face of Promobot’s co-founder, Alexei Yuzhakov.

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While the current version is only able to move parts of its face, engineers are said to be working on a version featuring moving limbs, too, giving it the chance to saunter about the studio during a news show.

Alex cost more than 1 million Russian roubles (about $15,600) to develop, and Promobot says it’s taken 12 orders for the android. However, it’s not entirely clear who purchased them and for what purpose.

Alex has so far read out a variety of news stories for Russia-24, among them items about agriculture, a nuclear technology forum, and micro-finance. Reading a piece about technology innovations at an exhibition taking place in in Moscow, Alex modestly declared that “the main hero was me.”

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