A series of new technologies including robots, virtual reality and voice recognition, have been employed by reporters nationwide to cover China’s political meetings in a more efficient way.

People’s Daily Online’s artificially intelligent robot Wangzai shakes hands with a guest at the two sessions. (Photo by Jiang Jianhua from People’s Daily Online)

A robot equipped with artificial intelligence technology was introduced by People’s Daily Online to cover the national legislative and political advisory sessions.

Capable of speaking, moving and thinking, the robot named Wangzai boasted outstanding performance in voice recognition, natural language processing and data mining.

The creation also worked as rookie reporter for a live broadcasting of the website to interpret the government work report.

A provincial TV station of eastern China’s Shandong province launched a cute robotic reporter for news broadcast, utilizing big data. Augmented reality technology and robotic swing arms were adopted by Henan Broadcasting and Television Station to offer audiences in-depth experience of news. Guizhou’s provincial television employed virtual reality and online processing technologies in its studio with an area of more than 600 square meters, presenting the viewers with more vivid, timely, comprehensive and insightful reports.

With the assistance of artificially intelligent voice recognition, which was firstly introduced by the new media center of People’s Daily to cover the two sessions, the newspaper has substantially improved its efficiency.

The system was used in live broadcast of the opening ceremony, press conference and other interviews during the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress to realize real-time Chinese-English textual translation.

A People’s Daily journalist records a virtual reality panorama video at the press conference for the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress. (Photo: People’s Daily)

The translated materials, after a manual review, could be published soon on social media, mobile applications and other platforms. The system made the newspaper update news faster than its peers.

Virtual reality panorama cameras, smart portable cradle heads, mini dolly kits and multichannel network transmission devices also lent a helpful hand to high-quality reports created by the new media center of the newspaper.