A memorandum of understanding was signed between CUHK’s InnoHK Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence and Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) earlier this month on enhancing the public broadcaster’s programme production and broadcasting with the Centre’s top-notch AI technology.

The signing ceremony was officiated by Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Professor Sun Dong and witnessed by CUHK’s Associate Vice-President (Innovation and Enterprise) Professor Daniel Lee, with Director of Broadcasting Eddie Cheung Kwok-choi and the Centre’s director Professor Helen Meng signing the agreement.

The two-year pact will see both parties working to bring AI to RTHK’s media production and broadcasting. A rich trove of Cantonese materials afforded by RTHK will enable the Centre to develop multilingual speech recognition models that process and analyse text and speech data, turning text into speech or the other way round.

Professor Meng also demonstrated on the occasion three multilingual speech AI technologies developed by the Centre, including the text-generating CPII ChatDoc Master, CPII Meeting Assistant speech to summary that summarises subtitles, and the first controllable Cantonese text-to-personalised speech generation that turns text inputs into speech that retains the user’s voice and timber.