Faced with many challenges in the new context, utilizing Al as a virtual assistant to support professional activities in some stages is a problem that is of great interest to press agencies.

Virtual assistant in content creation and production

Technology expert Dang Hai Loc, when discussing the impact of AI on the operations of newsrooms and journalists, said that AI frees people from repetitive tasks, but it also forces people and organizations to abandon the path of success through copying. “It takes a lot of creativity and the ability to deploy quickly to envision and reach a suitable position in the AI ​​wave,” the expert asked.

That story also opens up solutions for the newsrooms and journalists themselves - how to accept and apply artificial intelligence? The ultimate goal is clearly how to have better products, which is the driving force for newsrooms to operate and move.

In fact, although AI application software has many outstanding features, in the end, it is just a tool to serve the work activities to create works and press products according to the principles of the profession. As a tool, when wanting to take advantage of it, journalists must learn how to master it.

For journalism, AI has been actively supporting in many stages. Researching on the application of artificial intelligence in creating journalistic content, Ms. Do Thi Thu Hang - Member of the Standing Committee, Head of the Professional Department of the Vietnam Journalists Association, said that AI application software can become virtual assistants for journalists and press agencies in creating content, organizing content production and distributing digital press content.

Ms. Thu Hang said that there are many different ways to apply AI in content creation such as: summarizing text and document content, responding to user requests and topics or creating content and works from a new perspective, titling articles, and translating into multiple languages. These applications help journalists save time and professional labor. AI can be a powerful virtual assistant for journalists in searching and identifying information. AI technology application software can be used to detect topics, collect and process information to monitor events, extract information and identify trends.

There are even some free software that can act as a virtual assistant to automatically scan websites and download data such as: Scan Web Pro, Portia, UiPath, Diggernaut Cloud-based service for web scanning, data extraction. AI application software can automatically classify, organize and extract information from text to identify citation sources, relationships between texts (based on keywords), summarize text content. The editorial office can use text analysis software to process text collected from different sources in the digital environment effectively and accurately like humans such as: Amazon Comprehend, Plagiarism Detector, Wordsmith of Automated Insight...

In addition, AI supports the writing, editing, and content management processes to increase the speed of news production and newsrooms. In content production, AI can support features such as: Voice input; Text-to-speech; Content translation; Support independent fact-checking; Automatically identify requests from readers; Support organizing information and suggesting links between topics; Data visualization; Image analysis and recognition; Automatically write content, create news articles from available data.

In addition to using AI application software to create audio versions for all text posts, which is quite popular in newsrooms with two or more versions, many journalists and press agencies have been checking the facts and verifying the accuracy of previously published information (press releases...) through Google's Fact Check feature, and can even build their own software based on samples in AI libraries such as NLTK, Scikit-Learn...

Some Radio - Television stations and converged newsrooms can apply the feature of automatically producing repetitive structured content for some news such as weather, sports, technology, etc. by building automatic text generation software (NLG). Most recently, the Research Team of Ho Chi Minh City Television Station has successfully tested the application of ChatGPT to produce television reports on the technology content sector.

Mastering Al to turn “virtual” into real value

In practice working at the editorial office, Mr. Nguyen Hoang Nhat - Deputy Editor-in-Chief of VietnamPlus Electronic Newspaper said that thanks to technology, VietnamPlus reporters can create megastory articles and create graphic products quickly. For example, with only raw information such as data, AI can choose suitable graphics and charts, instead of reporters having to create them manually like before...

In terms of content distribution, AI tools can help newsrooms reach the public through chatbots, control public feedback, support and accelerate public research, market segmentation and public. “Journalists are standing on the edge of journalistic ethics, need to hone their professional skills, take advantage of the opportunities that AI brings, but still have to learn how to master technology, so that AI is a powerful tool for them,” Mr. Hoang Nhat shared.

Turning Al into a virtual assistant for journalists is also one of the ways to apply AI to journalism that the VOV Traffic channel - VOV has tested. Mr. Pham Trung Tuyen - Deputy Director of the VOV Traffic channel shared: “We are coordinating with a technology group to develop AI tools in content production, reporter Tran Ai of VOVGT is an example of those tests. Tran Ai scans the sources we specify, for example, scans all of VOVGT's broadcast sources, documents from online libraries as an assistant to the channel's journalists, exports reports, and can even write articles with pre-formatted formats like the article by Tran Ai about ChatGPT that you have read. Our tests are expected to take some more time to complete to deploy in some entertainment programs or convert VOV's broadcast works to different platforms, other formats" ...

Initial assessment of the effectiveness of the application, Mr. Tuyen said: "I think that if we look at the trend of using artificial intelligence, especially in supporting journalism, it is clear that we are approaching a great opportunity to be able to form a new, more effective way of doing journalism and it can bring about better quality journalism products."

In terms of training, we can see the pioneering role of the Kien Giang Provincial Journalists Association when it recently organized the opening of the training course "Application of artificial intelligence in journalism and post-production of radio and television products" for members.

According to journalist Doan Hong Phuc - Permanent Vice President of Kien Giang Provincial Journalists Association, this training course received positive response from members and was highly appreciated because it partly helped journalists apply necessary skills in professional activities according to modern press production trends, serving the working process, creating printed and electronic newspapers, radio, television, and propaganda tasks on electronic information portals.

Trainees were instructed to apply technology to convert video tapes and recordings into text saved on computers or phones; Apply artificial intelligence to exploit information; Apply technology to convert online meeting content into text; Apply technology to help field reporters work quickly without having to type articles or send emails, but the editorial office can still see the content and edit articles in text; Apply artificial intelligence in post-processing radio and television products... This shows that updating and seizing opportunities has been gradually spreading in journalism activities at editorial offices, members, and journalists.

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