Will Your DJs and Presenters Be Replaced with AI?
Alan Coote
Content and Development Director
Yes, AI-generated voices have reached a level of quality that is indistinguishable from human speech. Breakthroughs in generative AI have enabled the replication of human speech patterns, including tone, pace, pitch, and intonation. Live Drive's AI Presenters offer advantages such as opportunities for creative content, flexibility with access to a wide range of voices, increased availability as they work 24/7, automated content creation, convenience and consistency, and reduced costs. Initially, AI Presenters are being used for content such as weather, travel, sports results, competitions, news, PSAs, promotions, trails, and commercials. While some may fear the impact of AI on the radio industry, it can also create new opportunities for sponsorship and advertising income. Personality presenters may also be replaced by AI with unique quirks and characteristics. Overall, while AI may replace some traditional roles in the radio industry, it can also bring positive changes and should not be feared.
Before you shoot me down, this inevitable truth pains me too. Here’s how, why and who’s vulnerable now and in the near future.
AI generated voices are now at a quality they’ve now become indistinguishable from human speech. In fact, in a blind test of our Live Drive’s AI presenters, no one could tell they weren’t actually listening to real people! You can find out more about Live Drive AI presenters here.
The voices in this trail are all AI.
The breakthrough in AI voice synthesis comes from two recent advances:
Firstly, there have been a number of key breakthroughs in generative AI which is a key technology used to replicate human speech. There are many types of generative AI; for example ChatGPT, Bard and Bing which generate text. Others create images, then at the leading edge are bespoke models for generating ultra-realistic human speech.
It has taken years to get to this point, yet you can’t help but notice things have accelerated rapidly over the last year.
My own AI journey started 35 years ago as a software engineer when it was only possible to run artificial neural networks, the building blocks of today’s AI, of only a few artificial neurons deep. By contrast today’s AI models have billions of interconnect neurons which often run on dedicated silicon ‘neural engines’.
At its very simplest, to create ultra-realistic voices an AI model is trained on the key features which represent how a particular real person speaks. After training, which can still take many hours and often days, the AI model is able to faithfully reproduce attributes of that person’s speaking patterns such as tone, pace, pitch, intonation and the many others. The results are indistinguishable from real human speech even on new passages of text. The ultra-realistic AI voices used by Live Drive are a very significant change from the past and are at the heart of the AI Presenter voices used by our radio and audio products.
There as many advantages of using to Live Drive’s AI Presenters. Here are just a few.
The above may put the fear of God into many, but we shouldn’t look at it that way. Like ALL new technologies, AI Presenters will change what we do and how we do it but not necessarily for the worst.
For a moment let’s consider other transformational technologies: Cars traveling above the 1865 Locomotive Act’s speed limit of 4miles per hour (6km/h) turned out to be an improvement. The last 40 years of computing has created millions more jobs than have been replaced. Meanwhile AI has already been around for many years helping improve every aspect of our life. While the introduction of AI radio presenters is obviously a big change for the radio industry, it shouldn’t be feared.
Nevertheless…
Every radio station has content which needs voicing, such as Weather, Travel, Sports Results, Competitions, News, PSAs, Promotions, Trails and Commercials. Maybe you can think of several more? This ‘low-hanging fruit’ is the first to be fully automated with AI Presenters. In fact, Live Drive’s Weather AI Presenters have been producing content since early 2023.
For commercially minded stations, each of the above categories (with the exception of news which can’t be sponsored in many countries) creates an opportunity to generate more sponsorship and advertising income. At the flick of a switch, or in the case of Live Drive a click on a ‘check of a box’, your radio station has a team of AI presenters reliably creating new sponsorable content all day, every day. It’s honestly that simple!
Even if your staff are really good at present this type of content during ‘live’ hours, AI Presenters can fill in the rest of the day. By extending content to 24 hours a day increases its value and attractiveness to prospective sponsors – a big bonus!
At the Radio Days 2023 conference in Prague a senior radio group executive (we’ll protect his anonymity) said ‘presenters won’t be replaced by robots anytime soon’. Think again, that’s plainly wrong. But let’s be generous and assume he meant ‘personality presenters’, here AI will be used in a different and more creative way where are the personality.
Why not create AI Presenters with a personality where the quirkiness of intelligent machines, robots and cyborgs, is seen as endearing and a virtue? Just look at how characters like TV’s Max Headroom, Marvin the Paranoid Android and Star Wars’ R2D2, CP3O and many others have been portrayed.
Live Drive’s roster of AI presenters already have their own personalities, real world likes and dislikes; they even post to their own social media accounts.
As a former radio station owner, I know top talent rightly deserves the best rates of pay that can be afforded. As long as they are team players and bring in the audience then everyone is happy.
As running a radio station is a 24/7 operation, managers will always be looking for efficiencies and reducing costs. The convenience of having a long list of excellent AI voices at their fingertips really helps.
But human characteristics like creativity, humour, empathy, intuition, emotional intelligence, common sense and talent are now more important than ever before*. If you’re a presenter able to use these traits on-air, then your job is safe for now.
But whatever your role, you’ll have a much longer career in radio if you’re the person who embraces this technology and uses it creatively to your advantage than those that don’t.
You can find out more about Live Drive AI presenters here.
*A final twist - the list of human traits, where humans are better than AI, was created by an AI.