Unveiled at NAB Show 2024, Avid’s new digital assistant aims to support creative workflows by making them more efficient and taking care of redundant tasks so users can focus on content creation and delivery
Avid Ada uses AI technologies to automate speech-to-text transcription, summarisation, and language translation, streamlining news production workflows and enhancing efficiency by automating time-consuming tasks, said the company.
It is named after Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century English mathematician and writer, who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.
“We wanted to give the AI a personality so that it has a feeling of being a co-pilot or assistant in terms of creators’ work,” Tanya O’Connor, VP of market solutions at Avid, tells TVBEurope.
The company did “quite a bit of research” and brainstorming activities before finding Lovelace, who was the daughter of poet Lord Byron.
“Her mother was insistent that she not focus on poetry, so she really focused on science and mathematics, and it turns out she was quite gifted in that area,” explains O’Connor.
“Today she is known as being the creator of computer programming, and obviously she’s honoured in many different ways, but because of her father’s influence she wanted to ensure science was combined with artistic expression and that’s what Avid believes in. We see AI as being supportive of the work that humans do, not taking over the work.”
O’Connor admits that her colleagues took some convincing, but once she explained Lovelace’s history and why that connected to Avid’s philosophy, they became excited. “When we pitched it to the executive team in that vein with the whole history, they loved it. They got really excited about the fact that she is really an inspiration for the work that we’re trying to do.”
However, there have been some women weren’t keen on making the assistant ‘female’. “They see it as being representative of someone who is supportive and not necessarily leading,” states O’Connor. “But we see Ada as being powerful, intelligent, and supporting people to be extremely successful, as well as being a guide.
“I’m very proud that it’s a woman, and I’m proud to be able to tell that story and to tell Ada’s story,” she concludes.
