The world is constantly in motion. Coup attempts, changes of government, geopolitical influences and/or natural disasters are part of everyday reality. Modern monitoring systems can capture publicly available news from crisis areas and generate an approximate situation picture. However, one key building block is missing.

National broadcasters that still rely on terrestrial transmission via satellite or antenna are a good source of initial information. These sources must be used when local internet shutdowns are imposed or access to social media platforms is temporarily suspended.

In these situations, analysts depend on local news sources. In a project we supported, after the internet was shut down in a country in the Sahel region, it was important to obtain initial information. Before the coup, the national broadcasters had been transmitting in French due to regulations imposed by the former colonial powers. During the coup, they reverted to the African languages Hausa and Kanuri.

Figure 1: XENTAURIX Media and Broadcast Logger

To receive these local radio and TV stations and monitor the sources, satellite capacity was leased in rapid succession and (raw) video streams were tapped. Neighbouring countries were also included. Special loggers recorded the transmissions, and AI modules transcribed them from the source languages (French, Hausa, Kanuri) into English.

During transcription and translation, spelling and grammar rules such as punctuation and capitalization were taken into account. The text was delivered as full text in one-hour time packages (chunks) to the central monitoring system Talkwalker via our RS-Link platform connector. In Talkwalker, the analyst was able to use conversational analysis—Conversation Cluster and Blue Silk—to produce a highly meaningful situation assessment and summary of the discourse.

Since Talkwalker is not a conventional database but only references documents on the internet, the texts were packaged into HTML containers via the platform connector. This makes it possible to apply ex post analyses to the full text. In an optional expansion stage, it is also possible to provide the respective video sequences in the HTML containers, analogous to the transcriptions.

Figure 2: Radiosphere RS-Linx/Talkwalker/RS-Link

Using transcription and translation in more than 50 different languages opens up entirely new perspectives for broadcasters, press and news agencies, digital publishers, crisis centres, intelligence services, and the financial and business sectors. Current news programmes from the country/region are available with minimal delay, in sync with the broadcast, either as the original text or translated into English or German.

The technology we use comes from artec technologies AG, which offers a mature and robust solution with its XENTAURIX Media and Broadcast Logger. The XENTAURIX system is characterised by highly versatile logging technology and processes all leading broadcast and webcasting standards and formats. In addition to artec technologies AG, rola in Oberhausen also provides a solution with rsObIn. The latter captures, among other things, internet broadcasts and includes object recognition that uses OCR to extract subtitles and can identify and analyse weapons, people, symbols, brands and licence plates. Insiders report that AI models and machine learning components will also be used in the future for disinformation analysis of deepfakes in images, video and audio. The Vienna-based company eMedia Monitor offers a very broad base for terrestrial broadcasting. EMM is only planning to deploy AI modules, but is currently the market leader in terms of coverage of the stations and sources to be monitored.

Key takeaway

With today’s available technology combined with artificial intelligence, analysts’ information needs in the situation centre can be met. Radio & TV can now be seamlessly integrated into professional monitoring systems such as Talkwalker. Thanks to the high degree of automation, in many use cases this solution will be indispensable in the future for comprehensive conversation and discourse analysis.

Photos and graphics: artec technologies AG, Radiosphere, Hasan Almasi/Unsplash