Comment by matula

For what it's worth, AI has been running major market, corporate radio stations for at least 20 years now. When I left the industry they already had AudioVault or Prophet or some other systems that would pull all the songs and distribute them across the playlist based on various algorithms set by the corporate HQ. Things like how many times the same artist could be played during the day, and during which parts of the day... specific songs would get bumped up percentage wise... you couldn't play 2 female artists back-to-back... and so on. Someone at HQ would input the songs and criteria, but the rest was 95% algorithmically created.

The program director would literally hit a button and it would create the playlist for the week. The traffic department (ads) would have all the commercials also automatically placed within the list. Then there'd be a document to send to the on-air talent that showed what song was just played and what was coming up, and how long the break needed to be, and sometimes a script. At the time, quite a few got faxed to people and some did get emails... and the "DJ" would record their bits, set to the exact timing, and send them over an ISDN line. There was also some rudimentary STT (Dragon?) that transcribed the audio and was computer analyzed to make sure no cursing happened.

The PD would do some spot-checking, but I doubt he personally examined all 120+ hours of programming. And this was 2005.

I guess having a human voice did make it "feel" better? And the DJs did have some breaks that were unscripted, so their personality could come through. Even the best AI voices still don't have that.