Projects

We run six-week investigations into new technologies and their application — from chatbots to robo-journalism.

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83 projects

Active

Automated Chapter Links in BBC Sounds and iPlayer with mosromgr

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Basic English Explanations (BeX)

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CuPid

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Digital Paper Edit

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EuroVOX

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Evergreen Content

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Frank - Building a lingua franca through machine translation

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Guiding Hand

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IDX

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Image Annotations

Enabling journalists to add, localise and distribute simple scalable annotations on visual content.
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Live Highlights

Marking key moments in live streams, and surfacing them to audiences within the media player.
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Live Page Translation

Aggregating multilingual live page content through automatic translations.
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MOS Running Order Manager

Open source Python library for managing TV and radio running orders
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Matching Video Content from the World Service

Detecting reuse and re-versioning of video content on BBC social media channels
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Modus

Semi-automatically creating new story modes
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Multilingual Article Tracker (Mat)

Matching translated news articles with the original English-language text.
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Multilingual Solutions

BBC News Labs launched a stream of projects in 2014 in order to scale our storytelling globally through multilingual solutions. This workstream has been calibrated to include wider machine learning implementations.
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Oriel

Making it easier for journalists to find the best images for stories
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ReflEx

Knowledge management for news teams and audiences
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Segmenting broadcast content with The News Slicer

The News Slicer segments and tags BBC TV and radio broadcasts using running orders and transcripts.
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Streaming Transcription

A prototype for transcribing live feeds in real-time, as they happen
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Structured Journalism

Can we empower journalists with better ways of working with information, beyond the headline and text of a story?
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Tell Me More

Contextualising complex news by generating semi-automated explanations
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The Explainer Builder

An experiment in using a single source of truth for journalists creating explainers.
in use

360 Video & VR - Immersive News

We are looking into the craft, applications and audience experience around 360 video filming and VR for Immersive News.
in use

Audiogram Generator

A tool for turning audio content into video files that can be shared on social media.
in use

BBC for Voice User Interfaces

We’ve been leading the way in exploring how the corporation should sound on smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Echo.
in use

Depth Finder

Making the BBC's analysis, explainers and interactive features more discoverable
in use

News Switcher

News Switcher lets BBC journalists easily switch between the different editions of the News website
in use

Online Content Toolkit (OCTO)

The Online Content Toolkit, or Octo, is a project exploring media editing, repurposing and augmentation based on the results of intelligent analysis.
in use

SUMMA - Scalable Understanding of Multilingual MediA

Using a range of combined language technologies to support multilingual media monitoring.
in use

Stitch

A tool that allows journalists to create rich graphics video templates directly from their web browser.
in use

VodSounds

Publishing audio versions of TV shows to BBC Sounds.
completed

19 Million Project

A combination of a hack event and an education summit designed to deepen our understanding of the refugee crisis and develop innovative ways to tell the story.
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ALTO - a multilingual journalism tool

ALTO is a virtual voice-over tool for reversioning video content into multiple languages using text-to-speech voice synthesis
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API Testing for Newsroom Computer System

BBC News Labs worked with the BBC procurement team to help test APIs for the BBC's next generation broadcast running order system.
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Atomised News - with BBC R&D

News Labs has been working with BBC R&D to explore a mobile-focussed, structured breadth & depth approach to News experiences
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BBC Business Charts demo

An attempt to show news events seamlessly on stock charts
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BBC Drop - Pilot from Ongair in Nairobi

This Pilot concept pulls together BBC content based on a users social media profiles or their choice of topics.
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BBC Minute CatchUp - Pilot from RLabs in Cape Town

A web-widget that embeds into existing websites and webpages and offers users the latest Global news in just 60 seconds.
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BBC Rewind Collaboration

The News Labs team is working with BBC Rewind - a project liberating the BBC archive - to share tech and approaches.
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Babels and News Rig - Multilingual Journalism Workflows

A prototype workflow for reversioning content into multiple languages, and controlling an on demand multilingual news service.
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Blue Labs

BBC Blue Room and News Labs are working together to more efficiently demonstrate innovation opportunities with emerging consumer Tech.
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Bots

We're exploring how bots can help the BBC reach new audiences and simplify workflow for our editors and journalists.
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Captions - Who's talking when, in Parliament

Exploring the use of captioning workflows as a means to infuse our linear output with structured data.
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Climate Bot

What's easier to understand? An article, or a series of short explanations delivered over several days?
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Contributors

Identifying the most-used contributors to news stories.
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Crossing Divides

An interactive news game to give BBC audiences new skills for navigating polarised conversations.
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Data Pic - infographic builder for School Report

BBC News Labs ran several maker sessions at the BBC during 2014 and early 2015.
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Datastringer

Datastringer will help you subscribe to data sources, and will notify you when patterns arise or thresholds are broken.
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Device Switcher

Device Switcher lets developers and journalists view their websites in their mobile, tablet and desktop views
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Explainers - using structured journalism to provide context

As part of our push towards Structured Journalism, we are working on 'Explainers', an additional level of structure beyond the current tagging model.
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External Links Manager

ELMer is a prototype for automating external linking from BBC News stories.
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Gifenator

The Gifenator allows journalists to capture frames from live broadcast streams to republish as GIFs on social media channels.
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GoURMET - Global Under-Resourced MEdia Translation

Creating machine translation models for under-served and under-resourced languages
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Google Glass apps for BBC News

BBC News Labs investigated some preliminary ideas for Google Glass applications.
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Graphical Storytelling

Reaching new audiences with short comics about important health stories
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Growing Global Audiences

A programme of international innovation activities, aimed at harnessing localised industry talent to explore new opportunities.
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Hooked - A graphic novel about the drugs trade in Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau is used by South American drug cartels as a route to smuggle cocaine to Europe. Hooked is a five-part report of the human impact of that trade in the style of a graphic novel.
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Linked data on the TV

LDPTV is a project for surfacing more News content via smart TVs
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Live Segment Notifications

Alerting BBC audiences to live content about topics they're interested in
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Live Stream - Live video from Journalists' mobiles

Live View allows Journalists to IP 'live stream' via our digital services. It also supports wrapping/integrations these live streams with social conversations and linked data relationships.
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MT-Stretch

Improving neural machine translation through user corrections in real-time model updates.
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Make Your Own Million-Pound App: A Tutorial

Here's the lowdown on some of the technologies that we use to build our applications quickly.
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Neurotech Rig

In partnership with Imperial College London, News Labs has been looking into Neurotech feedback around media experiences.
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News Labs Maker Hack Sessions

BBC News Labs ran several maker sessions at the BBC during 2014 and early 2015.
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News Storyline

A linked data ontology to enable structured journalism and News storytelling at scale, across platforms and the internet.
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News in Space

The News in Space project attempts to find the similarity between all pieces of BBC content, no matter the format or subject.
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NewsMap

See News headlines, from 400+ publishers across the globe, on a map. This experiment was aimed at large displays, at expos.
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Newsroom.Tools - aka Journalist Toolbox - from newsHACK 2015

In June 2015, a hack team at newsHACK created a concept called The Journalist Toolbox, proposing that newsroom content publishing & presentation tools needed to be more accessible for journalists. This has been renamed to Newsroom.Tools
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Pool of Video

BBC News Labs is looking into some new research questions based on AV curation.
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RadioReader

RadioReader is an experiment that lets journalists find, extract and publish audio clips from incoming radio inputs.
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Referend-erm.com

Launched to help explain issues to young scottish voters in the 2014 Scottish Referendum.
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SCAMP - Speech Creation for Automated Multilingual media Production

Create spoken content anywhere, at any time, without access to specialist facilities such as TV and Radio studios or even microphones
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SCRIPT: Speech Synthesis for Spoken Content Production

SCRIPT is a 3-year research and innovation project looking to develop synthetic voices for low-resourced languages.
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Salco - Semi-Automated Local Content

Semi-automated local stories about election results, NHS performance and more
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Suggestr - connecting the News industry with BBC tags

A new intuitive and quick way of tagging news articles with linked data concepts, which opens the BBC's structured data to benefit local News organisations.
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The Juicer

The Juicer takes news content, automatically tags it, then provides a fully featured API to access this content and data.
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The Network of Content

The BBC has AN ENORMOUS amount of amazing content that can explain and contextualise the News. How do we connect and harness this?
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The Trust Project Challenge

News Labs and BBC Connected Studio are helping The Trust Project organise The Trust Project Challenge - a two-day hack event aimed at finding practical methods of signalling trustworthiness in online news.
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Touchcast

During late 2013 BBC News Labs ran a set of Touchcast pilots, and Touchcast moved to production in 2014.
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Transcriptor - create transcripts from News Video

Transcriptor takes news audio content, transcribes it, then provides a means to view and edit the transcript alongside the original content.
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Window on the Newsroom

Window on the Newsroom is a prototype discovery interface to help Journalists find content quickly across the whole Newsroom system by story or metadata properties

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