Abstract

Beyond the undoubted revival of the podcast, its presence in the offer of some Spanish radio stations deserves a detailed analysis. This study presents the analysis of this offer, as well as an approach to the challenges and questions behind the production of native podcasts, exclusively for web consumption. People ultimately responsible for radio programming has to deal with the traditional program schedule, in flow, and now has to add the management of a catalog of podcasts. The quantitative analysis is combined with the qualitative analysis through interviews with some of the top managers responsible for deciding how these two complementary radio offers should coexist. Results show that so far podcasts could be defined as a cultural product rather than a product of a cultural industry.

Abstract

The results of a project on news segmentation at Radio Nacional de España (RNE) carried out by the RTVE Technological Innovation and Media Management areas is presented. The aim of this project is to apply artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe and cut the news items that make up a radio news program. The main goals of this project are to increase the accessibility of the content and to allow its reusability on various platforms and social media. The project was planned in two phases, covering system configuration and service delivery. The minimum quality criteria required were defined in advance, both for automatic voice transcription and for news segmentation. For the speech-to-text process, the highest word error rate (WER) allowed was 10%, while the precision rate for the news segmentation was 85%. System performance in both transcription and segmentation was considered to be sufficient, although a higher degree of accuracy in news cutting is expected in the coming months. The results show that, despite using these quite mature technologies, adjustment and learning processes and human intervention are still necessary.