Northwestern University has developed an automated news-video program, News At Seven, with help from the National Science Foundation.

News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.

Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.

This is absolutely amazing. It's even cooler when you realize all that's going on behind the scenes to pull everything together. Watch the Celebrity news clip, it's pulling web news and blog commentary together, seamlessly.

This is a first attempt, for this group anyway, at automated newscasting, and it's only going to get better.

Imagine if dating sites went past canned photos of "sexy new singles", instead posting short, customized videoblogs every day which culled together information from across the system to present members with avatar-based video of notable new people worth checking out (and why you should pay attention to them based on how you match up.)

Avatars are cool. Avatars that reach into databases, find out what's new and notable and personalize the news via automated delivery are mind-blowing.

I want one!

Via Boingboing.

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