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June 02, 2020

BBC innovates how it delivers trusted news and entertainment with Azure AI

As one of the world’s oldest and largest global news and entertainment broadcasters, the BBC has built its reputation by delivering high-quality journalism with integrity to global audiences. It was looking for a strong partner that could help it build its own custom-branded voice assistant—but it needed full control over the experience, the customer relationship, and its customers’ data. With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service, the BBC created an end-to-end, customized digital voice assistant that captures its brand identity and helps establish a new conversational relationship with its many audiences.

BBC

“Azure offers us the flexibility and control we needed to create a natural, branded voice assistant while maintaining the necessary privacy for our customers’ data.”

Jeremy Walker, Head of Technology Transformation, BBC

Keeping public service broadcasting at the bleeding edge of technology

For nearly a hundred years, the BBC has been one of the most trusted sources for news and content, both in the United Kingdom and around the world. But maintaining that position has required the organization to stay at the forefront of evolving technologies to ensure that its content is available for audiences and to deliver on the opportunities that new formats and functionalities present.

From its founding in the pioneering days of radio broadcasting and its transition to television, the BBC has always fought to stay at the bleeding edge of technological evolution. It was one of the first broadcasting organizations to launch online, rolling out its video-on-demand platform, BBCiPlayer, in 2007. More recently, it has been leading the world in its social media news operation.

An intelligent voice assistant

In June 2020, the BBC launched a beta voice assistant across the United Kingdom, letting people verbally interact with the broadcaster in a new way and setting the organization on a path to a more collaborative relationship with its audiences. To begin with, the assistant will offer conversational content discovery of the BBC’s audio portfolio, where users can find content that’s relevant to their interests by using their voices rather than a mouse, touchscreen, or another conventional input device.

After the initial release, the broadcaster will explore expanding its voice assistant’s capabilities to serve international audiences in different regions and to provide increased functionality so that users can journey through its vast video, text, and audio portfolios.

The challenges of serving a broad audience

Inclusivity lies at the heart of everything the BBC does, from its diverse workforce to its multilingual, multiformat content. In building out a voice interface that provides access to the organization’s content and services, the BBC is working to create a voice-activated assistant that can seamlessly interact with the broad range of accents from across the United Kingdom. With the possibility of expanding into other markets and languages over time, it wants to lay the foundations for a versatile, flexible solution. To reach its audiences more effectively in the age of AI-enabled technologies, the broadcaster is using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to help it develop the voice assistant.

Building a voice recognition agent that meets all these requirements is a steep challenge—one that’s almost impossible if building a voice assistant from scratch. “Without platform resources like Azure Cognitive Services, we would have to build something bespoke for each audience language and dialect,” says Christopher Dix, Head of Architecture at the BBC. “Then we’d have to mix and match technologies to understand the full range of accents and regional dialects.”

Fast-tracked AI development

To build a powerful, flexible, and scalable AI voice agent and speech recognition platform that accurately reflects its brand, the BBC used Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services, including Custom Neural Voice and Language Understanding. Plus, it’s one of the first Microsoft customers to use Direct Line Speech.

After going through the process of voice talent selection, script creation, and training and tuning, the BBC generated an incredibly natural-sounding voice that matches the intended style and tone of the smart assistant representing the BBC brand using the Custom Neural Voice capability. “Using Custom Neural Voice, we were able to use customer insights to create a voice that resonates with our audience,” says Dix. “It’s helping us develop a strong brand identity for the voice assistant.”

The BBC was able to customize the speech recognition system to its broad range of content—including content with unusual titles, like specific podcast episodes. And by using Bot Framework through the Direct Line Speech channel, the BBC easily integrated the assistant with its various back-end systems for access to a wide range of content. This means that over time, different BBC departments can be reflected within the assistant with ease.

“We’re not a big tech firm. We don’t have the resources to build out an assistant’s entire complex AI technology stack,” says Mukul Devichand, Executive Editor of Voice + AI at the BBC. “My team of creatives really appreciate the flexibility and tools they now have to be able to create compelling experiences and do it relatively fast.”

The BBC team also created customized keywords, “OK Beeb,” which enable a user to start interacting with the assistant. Additionally, the BBC is the first company to use deep integration with the Multiple Voice Assistant platform in recent releases of the Windows operating system, which means the voice assistant can even respond to the keywords when the application isn’t running in the foreground.

“We looked at several voice and AI technologies,” says Jeremy Walker, Head of Technology Transformation at the BBC. “Azure offers us the flexibility and control we needed to create a natural, branded voice assistant while maintaining the necessary privacy for our customers’ data.”

Emphasis on responsible AI

As one of the most trusted news organizations in the world, the BBC always puts its customers’ data privacy first, and this was a priority when creating a voice assistant. “Normal organizations have shareholders; we have our audience. And the fact that they can trust our service is paramount,” says Walker.

But like any voice assistant, the BBC’s assistant needs audience data to learn, adapt, and improve over time. That’s why the BBC is working closely with Microsoft to maintain complete control over how that data is used, striking a balance between improving the service and protecting users’ interests while maintaining transparency for its audience. “Microsoft allows us to have an input on how things like data privacy work,” says Walker. “That kind of control reassured us, and it’s helping us make a solution that puts our users’ interests at the heart of what we do in this space.”

Conversationally helping to serve the right content to the right audiences

After the BBC completes the pilot for its voice assistant in the United Kingdom, it hopes to extend the service to make its content accessible to an even wider global audience. And while the assistant operates through speech today, the BBC also plans to use it across other conversational platforms.

“We see the true value of our voice platform as helping us develop a true two-way relationship with each member of our audience, allowing them to help us give them the best experience we can offer each of them as individuals,” says Walker. “By taking advantage of already built, ready-to-scale Azure services, we can focus on delivering the right powerful content and impartial news for each audience member in a way that best suits them.”

Adds Devichand, “It’s about discovering and playing with our wonderful content. It’s about what it means to be informed about the world, to ask questions about the news or sports or the weather, to be entertained, to seek out a laugh, or to seek out music and discover culture as we do through our programs—all in this new, conversational medium that is voice and AI.”

Find out more about the BBC on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Without platform resources like Azure Cognitive Services, we would have to build something bespoke for each audience language and dialect. Then we’d have to mix and match technologies to understand the full range of accents and regional dialects.”

Christopher Dix, Head of Architecture, BBC

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