How vendors are adopting AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) – and its near relation machine learning – have been media industry buzzwords for a while. Great claims are being made for them, but what is actually practical and what is being done today?

Image recognition is a commonly quoted application, with cloud processing making facial recognition reasonably fast and reliable.

At the recent NAB exhibition, David Schleifer of Primestream talked about “confidence levels”. You can set the level of the bar above which you will believe the machine. He suggested that you might want to trust a positive if the machine thought it was 80% confident it was right.

His company uses AI for asset preparation. The Organisation of American States (OAS) has long plenary sessions, and Primestream edits the recordings into packages tailored for each member state, based on who is talking.

Schleifer made the point, though, that AI is not a goal in itself, but part of a broader operation. “If AI is a separate system, it’s…