We are enormously excited today to announce the debut of the AI Television Explorer, powered by the TV AI API 2.0, a prototype of a future in which we can leverage the power of AI to move beyond the textual keyword search that has dominated our digital access to information for more than half a century and for the first time visually search a decade of television evening news through computer vision.
Through the power of Google's Cloud Video API, for the first time you can now visually search a decade of television evening news broadcasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, along with the entirety of CNN from January 25, 2020 to present that has been non-consumptively analyzed from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive in a secure research environment. What does television news look like through the eyes of AI? What new kinds of analyses become possible when we can search what is seen on television in addition to what is said?
This new interactive search tool allows you to interactively query a decade of evening news broadcasts and a month of CNN through computer vision analysis of the objects and activities depicted onscreen, OCR of all onscreen text, automatic speech recognition-generated computerized transcripts, the original station-provided human-generated closed captioning and a semantic topical analysis of that captioning through Google's Cloud Natural Language API that allows you to abstract away from the literal spoken words to the high-order topics and events they describe.
The AI Television Explorer offers a glimpse into the future of visual and video search. More than 400 million annotations across more than 9,000 broadcasts totaling 21 million seconds of airtime are searchable here in realtime, with volume timelines, streamgraphs, station charts, word clouds and visual galleries, along with direct links out to all of the matching clips on the TV News Archive's site.
To get you started here are some example searches.
Visual Searches
- Firefighters and Fire Departments.
- Police.
- Protests And Riots.
- Military Rank Insignia.
- Aircraft.
- Bus.
- Polar Bears. (Demonstrates using the advanced search option for less common entities).
Onscreen Text Searches
Closed Captioning Searches
- Mentions of the price of gas in the machine-generated transcript.
- Invocations of Donald Trump in the station-provided closed captioning. (May be up to 10 seconds off the precise mention due to using the uncorrected captioning).
Get Started With The AI Television Explorer