Wednesday’s 7 pm news on the private channel Channel 24 began as it always does, with Israt Amin and Farabi Hafiz at the desk. About eleven and a half minutes in, Hafiz introduced a third presenter. A young woman: navy shirt, cream blazer, dark eyes, arched brows, a deep pink lipstick, hair combed flat, two small earrings and no other jewellery. She looked like a new hire. “Like you, I will try to read the news,” she said. “How far I can manage, I do not know. Viewers, welcome — I am Aparajita.”
What she is
Aparajita is not a person. She is a face and a voice generated by software — an “AI presenter”, in the channel’s phrase — and Wednesday was the first time one has read the news in Bangladesh, ten days after Odisha TV in India introduced its AI anchor, Lisa. She read for five minutes in standard Bangla pronunciation, threw to a reporter, sat through the footage and signed off. The voice has a faintly metallic quality and the facial movement a trace of the mechanical; the enunciation is better than some of her human colleagues’.
How she was made
“We bought the core software,” Talat Mamun, the channel’s executive director, told Prothom Alo, “and our IT and production departments built Aparajita on it.” The idea was old, the planning took about a month, and the build itself fifteen days, most of it choosing among sample voices and tuning the face. The workflow is the same as for a human anchor: she is given the cue sheet and the script, the software turns the text into speech and lip movement, and she can exchange lines with a co-presenter. She exists only on screen; there is no studio robot. For now she will appear once a week, and she was to feature the same night on the channel’s technology programme, Control. “Gradually she will be in more programmes, and there will be more presenters like her,” Mamun said.
Why “Aparajita”
The word means “undefeated”. “So that she doesn’t lose,” Mamun said. “She is the country’s first AI newsreader, so we gave her that name.”
The question under the blazer
A news channel’s presenters are its most expensive and most recognisable staff, and an avatar that reads a bulletin for the cost of a software licence is, whatever anyone says at the launch, a demonstration of what could replace them. The technology is not there: Aparajita cannot ad-lib, interview, or react to breaking news, and a voice that cannot be trusted with a mispronounced name cannot be trusted alone with a bulletin. But she can read at 3 am, in the ticker hours nobody watches, and that is where the second AI presenter in Bangladesh will most likely appear. Channel 24 has made a piece of history and a very clear statement of intent. The country’s newsreaders will have noticed both.
