In the thousands of years since the ancient philosophers, AI technology has seen several significant advances. In fact, it’s likely that AI has had an impact, in a number of ways, on your daily life! AI has already been employed in countless technologies and has been used to streamline a number of important processes.
In fact, AI can also be found in use within your television! AI can do a number of things to help enhance the TV experience and to help our TVs look and sound better than ever before. In this ultimate guide to AI in TV, we’re going to take a look at all of the many ways AI can improve your TV experience, and what the future of AI in TV might just have in store! Let’s get started!
How Is AI Being Implemented In TVs?
If you were to dive into the many components of your smart TV, you would eventually come across the all-important processor. If a smart TV were a living thing, then the processor would be its brain! The processor is charged with ensuring the smooth operation of all of the smart TV’s most important functions. Let’s say you were hopping between streaming services. The smart TV’s processor would monitor all of this to ensure that the transition from one service to the next is as smooth as possible.
AI has been implemented in TVs in a number of unique ways. From improving image quality and audio quality, to also improving the way a TV operates. AI can help with voice controls, and even provide recommendations!
Smart TV processors are key to keeping a smart TV running. Without a healthy processor, your TV would be sluggish and unpleasant to use! However, as important as a smart TV’s processor is, it’s only able to handle a set number of basic management problems. When a smart TV’s processor is supplemented with AI it is able to actually learn from the TV’s user. AI within smart TVs can help to provide a more personalised experience. As well as this, an AI can also help to improve the picture and sound quality of a TV.
Let’s take a look to find out some of the many ways AI has already been implemented in modern televisions!
How AI Can Improve Picture Quality
Image upscaling is a feature commonly found in many 4K and 8K TVs. It’s a useful function that helps to ensure that legacy content doesn’t get left in the dust. Let’s say you buy a brand new 4K TV, but you’re worried about your existing collection of Blu-ray films. With upscaling, lower-resolution Blu-ray content can be bumped up to a 4K resolution in real-time. This allows non-4K content to display as if it was originally produced with 4K in mind.
AI can help to improve picture quality by aiding in the image upscaling process!
However, image upscaling is often very limited. Many upscaling programs found in smart TVs involve a large degree of guesswork. The processor is trying to guess what elements of a given image need to be improved at any time. This can occasionally lead to images that actually look duller than they did before, and a total loss of clarity and contrast.
What Is AI Image Upscaling?
Ordinarily, when image upscaling is performed by a smart TV, it is done on a frame-by-frame basis. For the most part, this is done by simply adding in extra pixels, to help lower-resolution images suit larger screens without appearing stretched. AI can take a more considered approach.
Instead of only considering each frame in isolation, each frame is compared to a number of the frames that come before and after. This helps the AI to recognise distinct shapes in the image to focus on. This helps with enhancing clarity and sharpness, as well as ensuring consistency in every frame.
AI upscaling also approaches the task in a very different way. Ordinary upscaling programs seek to simply improve a low-resolution image, to make it appear high-resolution. AI upscaling instead approaches the task in the opposite direction. The AI instead imagines a high-resolution image that would naturally downscale to look like the original image. This helps to ensure even more consistency, and gives the AI a framework to work with!
AI image upscaling programs are often highly trained, using complex banks of images and videos. These banks of data give the AI a complete sense of how film and TV content is supposed to look at its best.
AI image upscaling programs are often highly trained, using complex banks of images and videos. These banks of data give the AI a complete sense of how film and TV content is supposed to look at its best. The P5 processor found in Philips TVs, for example, contains an internal database of thousands of images and videos, curated by Philips themselves. The AI in the P5 processor thus draws on this bank of knowledge to inform its work!
AI upscaling programs also improve image quality by enhancing the colour range and colour depth. Many older pieces of content, especially those found on DVDs and Blu-rays have more limited colour depth. AI upscaling can introduce more colours into every image, to help older content take full advantage of HDR screens.
How AI Can Improve Sound Quality
Sound is crucial to a fulfilling TV experience. Sound is the extra dimension that creates the sense that every character on screen is living and breathing. Sometimes, however, sound can leave a lot to be desired, drawing you out of the action. Luckily, AI can help in several ways to improve sound quality.
Again, AI upscaling programs depend on vast banks of knowledge that help them to understand how things like music, human speech, and ambient audio work. The best AI upscaling programs are trained with vast banks of knowledge that help to equip them with everything needed for specific tasks.
Many AI upscaling programs are trained to recognise distinct layers of sound in audio tracks. By doing this, AI can isolate voice tracks to make dialogue easier to hear in film and TV shows!
Good AI upscaling will be able to take an audio track and analyse it to detect unique sound layers. Digital audio is made up of all kinds of layers of sound. The best way to picture it is to imagine your favourite song. When you sit down to actively listen to your favourite song, you can identify not only the vocalist but also the various instruments at the back of the song. A good AI upscaling program can do just that.
Once an AI upscaling program has detected all of the unique layers of an audio file, it can then isolate and separate them. This will allow the TV to send the sound out to specific speakers. This means that even standard stereo audio can be upgraded to more immersive surround sound audio!
How AI Can Improve Voice Controls
Voice assistant programs have become totally essential in homes across the UK. Voice assistants can be used to handle a number of tasks around the home, using only your voice. If you have an Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant device of your own, you already know that these devices can respond to your prompts in a dynamic and intelligent way. You tell Alexa to tell a joke, and she’ll come up with a gag that will have you in stitches. It’s some very impressive technology that makes great use of AI.
In order for voice assistant programs to respond so intelligently and appropriately, they had to first be trained in the ways of human speech. Human speech is incredibly complex. There are so many features of human speech that straight-talking computer programs often have trouble with. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have been trained with billions and billions of transcripts of human speech, as well as audio recordings. This allows voice assistants to keep up with all kinds of voiced requests. Voice assistant technology is also perfect for TVs!
Many smart TVs now come with voice assistants built in, or they are compatible with popular voice assistants. Users can then make requests to these voice assistants to control aspects of the TV. Want to turn down the volume of the TV? Simply ask Alexa!
Voice assistants, especially those found in TVs, have been improved massively in recent years. They are no longer tripped up significantly by thick accents, or those with distinct speech impediments.
How AI Can Improve Content Recommendations
Mindlessly scrolling through streaming services to find something decent to watch is a situation we’ve all experienced. However, AI can streamline this, and help you to find the content that’s perfect for you, without having to dig through entire content libraries.
Whenever you open a streaming service, tune into a specific channel, or watch a film in a specific genre, your smart TV’s AI can gather data. The AI can then use this data to build a profile of you as the user. This profile can help to give the AI a sense of your tastes, and the kind of content you prefer.
By making use of AI, your smart TV can recommend specific content that it thinks you will enjoy. This content will often be placed front and centre on your smart TV’s homepage, so you can dive right into content that has been curated just for you.
The more a user interacts with their smart TV, the more the AI will be able to learn. Thus, the more the AI is interacted with, the more personalised the TV experience is for the user. Whenever users rate a piece of content or dismiss a recommendation, the AI is able to use this data to fine-tune its recommendations.
Recommendation algorithms can also be found outside of your smart TV. Popular music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music can recommend new songs, albums, and playlists, based on your tastes, and the kind of lifestyle you lead. If you listen to a particular type of music in the gym regularly, the service can recommend further music that suits this!
How Is AI Being Implemented In Content Production For TV?
As well as impacting our trusty boxes at home, AI has also impacted the wider television industry across the world. Major studios and television networks have been implementing AI into their workloads for a number of years, to help improve the way content for your TV is actually produced!
The inclusion of AI in the modern TV and film industries is incredibly complex and multifaceted, so it’s worth taking a look at some of the distinct ways AI has had an impact.
How Will AI Impact The Film And TV Industries?
AI has been used within the film and TV industries for a number of years. However, the way in which AI is used in these industries is set to see a very significant change over the next few years. AI was first implemented in the TV industry around 2007, when major services began using it to improve recommendations for users. Ever noticed how Netflix is able to always recommend the perfect shows for you? Early AI is to thank for this!
As AI grew more advanced and capable it was then implemented into the TV and film industries to help streamline specific tasks. These include things such as generating special effects. AI can, for example, be used to simulate water, to allow for realistic effects.
However, as AI grows more and more powerful, it has since reached the point at which it can not only handle specific menial tasks but also generate content. This is set to have a severe impact on creatives in the TV industry. Let’s take a look at this impact.
AI And Writing
If you’ve ever played around with ChatGPT before, you’ve likely found yourself impressed at how accurately the program is able to work from your prompts. If you ask the program to produce an essay about William Shakespeare, it will be able to do so in mere seconds, drawing from information that can be found all across the web.
While long-form text from ChatGPT is far from perfect, it can make for a great place to start with any piece of writing. ChatGPT can help you to come up with a structure for your piece, or a few basic ideas to get your mind going. ChatGPT, thus, is great for preventing writer’s block. This would mean that writers of some of the best films and TV shows can spend more time creating, and less time staring at a blank page!
Unfortunately, the very real rise of AI writing in TV production is a source of concern for many writers. Within a single year alone, AI has gone from writing garbled and messy text to legible and engaging text. Writers are worried that studios might begin taking extreme measures to cut costs. You don’t need to pay an AI program to write a script, and these programs can also generate a script in seconds. Cutting out writers entirely would be an effective way for studios to save millions!
While AI can help writers deal with the dreaded “Writer’s Block”, it does pose a potential threat. Professional television writers fear AI taking over writing jobs to save studios mountains of cash.
Regardless of all of the potential moral implications of AI writing, many film and TV scripts have already been written with AI assistance. AI is tasked with first writing out a script before that script is overseen by a qualified editor. It’s likely that as AI programs improve, more studios will employ them in writing all manner of content!
AI And Film Production
When it comes time to put a film together, AI can affect production in a number of ways. Once all of the footage has been filmed, and it’s time to put everything together, AI can play a key role in editing. Editing a film is a long and difficult task, and AI can help to streamline a number of aspects of it. This will free up time for editors to finish more projects.
AI can also get involved within VFX, to create game-changing CGI. AI can handle some of the more menial VFX tasks. Let’s say a VFX film needs to render an explosion. Instead of painstakingly combing through every frame to ensure every particle of the explosion is realistic, they can enlist an AI program to simulate the actual motion of an explosion. AI is shown thousands of videos and photos of explosions that it can use as a reference point for accuracy. Again, there are worries about AI completely taking over jobs from VFX artists.
AI is also changing the way in which actors perform for the camera. Disney has largely been at the forefront of this. In many of their recent blockbuster efforts, they have been able to successfully de-age specific actors. This is done by providing an AI program with reference photos of an actor when they were younger. The program can then superimpose a younger version of the actor’s face onto them, while they act.
AI can also be used to simply generate crowds to fill up the backgrounds of scenes that would otherwise require countless paid extras. While this can save studios a lot of time and trouble, it has also raised concerns about AI replacing actors.
AI And Marketing
AI is having an indelible impact on advertising and marketing. No longer are adverts limited to TV ad breaks or the sides of buses. Thanks to AI, ads can now be targeted directly at the people they can most benefit.
TV studios can now leverage the power of AI and the internet to ensure that shows are always pushed to their intended audience. If a studio was planning to release a crime drama TV series, they could leverage AI to find internet users with an interest in the genre.
This can be beneficial in ensuring that films and shows always find their intended audiences. It will lead to a higher chance of success even for the lowest-budget productions! In turn, this can mean that more productions are greenlit, which leads to greater choice for those looking to enjoy content on their TV.
AI and marketing go together like bread and butter. AI is able to efficiently gather data about online users that marketing teams can then use to inform their advertising campaigns.
However, marketing teams will need to exercise moderation when using AI. Depending so much on demographics and market research could lead to studios becoming more wary. Why risk spending so much money on a production that AI has not verified as a surefire success? Many creatives within the film and TV industries fear a greater trend towards profit over creativity. Leading to content that is creatively bankrupt and intended only for maximising profit.
How Can AI Help To Improve TV Subtitles?
As television technology and content production move into the future, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of accessibility features that can make TVs easier for everyone to use. Subtitles will continue to play a huge role in the world of televisions well into the future.
AI is already used by a number of companies across the world to produce accurate and reliable subtitles. We mentioned earlier that AI can be trained to listen to an audio track and isolate dialogue from it. When producing subtitles the AI will listen out for dialogue, and convert it into a transcript. This transcript is timed to the piece of footage that is being subtitled. This ensures that subtitles show up at just the right time. All an editor then needs to do is read over the subtitles, and make sure they are accurate.
This is great when you consider just how long subtitling can take otherwise. Before the widespread use of AI, subtitles were written out and timed to footage manually. Naturally, this takes a very long time to do! With the help of AI, films and TV shows can be subtitled much quicker. More films and shows can be subtitled in a shorter space of time. Making TVs more accessible than ever.
Can AI Generate Subtitles In Real Time?
AI can also be used to generate subtitles and closed captions in real-time. This technology is useful for video platforms like YouTube. YouTube is updated with new content every second, so subtitling everything manually is simply impossible.
In order to generate subtitles, AI is first trained to recognise human speech. This takes a lot of time and a lot of data. No two people ever speak exactly the same. Thus, an AI program needs to be able to understand even the thickest of accents, or even vernacular language.
AI subtitles are far from perfect. For every few words it correctly transcribes, the AI may incorrectly identify another. However, as AI grows more and more capable, as it has proven, these imperfections will likely be ironed off.
What Is The Future Of AI In Televisions?
Time will tell what further impacts AI will have on televisions and the production of TV content. AI has been employed in TVs for a number of years already to help improve their performance, and to improve fidelity across the board. In recent years, AI has been used to help improve the user experience, by improving voice controls, and recommendations.
It’s likely that AI in TVs will build on the strong foundations that have already been built, to make the user experience all the more personal.
Real-Time Translation
The world is now more interconnected than it ever has been before. This is partly evidenced by the explosion in popularity of international content. From K-Pop bands taking over radio stations, to international drama programmes achieving big numbers on Netflix. With content now able to travel all across the world, it’s more important than ever to translate content suitably.
Translation isn’t easy. That’s no secret. And it takes an incredibly long time to translate a piece of content from one language to the next. This is where AI can come in. Much like with how AI assists in subtitling, AI can translate and transcribe content instantly, so that translators only need to spend a minor amount of time editing for accuracy. However, while major names like Netflix are already using AI translation technologies, they are still very much in their infancy.
AI translation technologies are already widely used by studios like Netflix. They make the job of translating and subtitling content much smoother and more efficient. Countless man-hours don’t have to be invested into the task.
AI translation is only currently dependable with the most popular languages. While it’s likely that AI translation will expand to more and more languages, it will take some time for this technology to be widely accessible. Given enough time, there is potential for AI TVs to be equipped with real-time translation technology that can translate content from across the world, instantly.
Personalised Content
We’ve talked a lot in this article about improving the personalisation of TVs. AI can learn from how users interact with their TVs, and then improve the user experience. Ai can also learn about user tastes, to recommend content that aligns with those tastes.
Some pundits have suggested that TV personalisation could be taken a step further in the future. AI could take data about user preferences, and actually generate content to suit their tastes. While this sounds outlandish, and like something out of a science fiction tale, it is a concept that is already being explored with great interest in many places.
Improved Live TV
Live TV is broadcast as and when events occur. This leaves very little time for TV producers to generate extra elements and content to go along with the coverage. AI can help live news reporting and sports coverage in a number of ways. AI can work incredibly quickly and can take existing data and produce legible graphics and charts in mere seconds. This can help to make live TV coverage more accessible and more engaging.
AI can produce these graphics in an instant and doesn’t need to take any breaks. This can help to save studios a lot of money that they can then invest into big-budget scripted content!
Frequently Asked Questions
How Will AI Impact The Television Experience?
AI has already impacted the way we enjoy TV in a massive number of ways. AI helps to ensure that our TVs run smoothly and that they look and sound fantastic. However, recent AI technologies have allowed our TVs to be more personalised to our individual tastes. It’s likely that AI will help to make TVs even smarter in the coming years.
How Has AI Helped Netflix?
AI has been helping Netflix for a number of years. In the early years of the streaming platform, AI was first implemented to provide personalised recommendations to users. In recent years, AI has been implemented to help with translating international content. It’s likely that Netflix is looking to AI to help streamline the process of producing content.
How Is AI Used In Streaming?
The key way AI is implemented into streaming is through custom recommendations. AI can learn of a user’s tastes, and use this information to help users to find content that suits them. This can help streamers to retain their user base. Users won’t find themselves unsatisfied looking for content, and shows won’t be left to flounder without an audience!
How YouTube Is Using AI?
One of the key ways AI is used to improve YouTube is by generating subtitles and closed captions for content. Videos on the platform that don’t have subtitles can be generated in real time as users watch them. This helps to make YouTube a more accessible platform, which in turn improves user retention.
