Monday morning at the NAB Show 2024 in Las Vegas saw a welcome session hosted by Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig, and Ameca, an autonomously AI-powered humanoid robot.
Just about everybody in the media world is now very aware that AI is here, and is not going anywhere, and Futuri is fast positioning itself as one of the key AI players in media, and is known primarily to many for its ‘Radio GPT’ product (now rebranded as ‘Audio AI’).
The keynote took the conventional route of delivering lots of facts and stats, presented to impress and inspire its audience, whilst simultaneously managing to take a somewhat unconventional route of having plenty of human and humanoid interaction.
Ameca answered many questions that Anstandig put to it (or should that be “her”?). Responses were very quick, usually included some humour, all seemed to be factually correct, and there were lots of nice things said about Futuri. Human-like facial expressions, hand gestures, and even irony, all made for an original, engaging, fun, informative and highly impressive keynote.
Anstandig and Ameca enthused about the positives of AI, reminding the audience that the benefits of AI outweigh any negatives (not that the word “negatives” was ever used). Together, they did a good job of explaining how all the dull processes that the broadcast media industry was likely spending 90% of its time on (versus 10% on creativity) can be flipped with the help of AI applications, so that we can instead spend 90% of our time creating and 10% on the dull stuff.
The event’s raison-d’être was to tell the audience about the results of Futuri’s AI in Media Study, which revealed how audiences expect media to use AI (both behind the scenes and on the air), how audiences think AI could improve news stories, music selection, weather forecasts, commercials, and more.
One of the standout stats was that 3 out of 4 radio listeners said AI would improve the music, improve the DJ content and intros to music, improve the weather and forecasts, improve news and sports.
And, interestingly, the study found that 1 in 5 radio listeners say they listen to a radio station that uses AI.
We were also told that 90% of consumers say it is somewhat or very important to disclose that content or voice were created using AI, and that any sort of “surprise, what you just consumed was AI content” should be avoided at all costs.
That said, there was a fun commercial radio-style game called ‘AI or Human’, where the audience had to decide whether the clips of three radio presenters were generative AI or real human voices. There were plenty of calls of “human” and “AI” from attendees, but we were told that all three voices were AI, surprising many. There were more than a few open mouthed reactions to this information!
We also heard the new version of the answer to the question everybody has been asking for a few years now: “Will my job be replaced by AI?”. “No, but it will likely be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI”.
The keynote provided a compelling reason to believe that this answer is likely to be very accurate, very soon.
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