Sensara.tv Launches Live News Topic Tracking for Indian Elections

Tune to news.sensara.tv for live coverage of news around Indian elections across top Indian live news channels like NDTV, Aaj Tak, Republic, TV18, etc. Our systems at Sensara.tv are looking deep into the channels to organize the news around topics being discussed - live. The lists refresh every 30 seconds. You'll not miss what every channel is talking about. All live, kept up to date to the second. You'll also get live transcripts in English, so you can track what that Bengali channel is talking about.

This is powered by a speech recognition system, ad break detection system, topic discovery system, Gen AI from an LLM and clustering.

Why are we doing this?

India has about 200+ news channels, distributed along these languages.

Viewership across news channels is also dominated by the population that is conversant with that language. These news channels tend to have the highest influence on public opinion in the country.

Each of these news channels are live, changing from a news headline to a report, to an interview, to a discussion, to a public poll. News is very dynamic. Things are breaking all the time. Every news channel is watching the other news channel and constantly trying to attract and keep the viewer glued. They do gimmicks, dramatics and rhetoric to stay on top of the charts.

Yet, for the viewer, there's no way to figure what the news channel is talking about before they jump in. They need to tune to channel to find out, and if they don't like what is going on, they need to bounce. This results in the highest number of bounces among TV genres.

The EPG (Electronic Program Guide) on all disconnected and connected TV boxes looks like this. There is only mention of the name of the show and not the topic being discussed.

From today, we change that. You'll know the topic being played out before you switch to the channel. To start with, this is available on a select few Hindi and English news channels and we will catch up to cover every live news channel in India soon.

How does this work?

Sensara's AI system crawls the raw video feeds of the national public channels, extracts audio and video to put them through analysis, and then figures out the topics being discussed in them. This is a continuous process, and Sensara's systems analyze new speech every 3 seconds. Analysing speech is fairly nuanced, and we need to remove music, ad breaks, and in some cases figure who is speaking. Sometimes, some sounds are cues that the context has changed, and we need to start afresh.

The topics learnt from each feed is then fed into a clustering pipeline that pools what every channel is talking about, looks for similarities between them and comes up with nice headings to explain the similarities.

The end results are cached and presented along with the original video feeds for the channels. The news channels get to monetize their channels in their own way.

More about Sensara.tv

Sensara.tv's mission is to understand videos and help video retrieval. We've been working so long on fiction and entertainment videos - which by the way, have their own quirks and nuances. News is a dynamic world in itself - rich in topics, debates, personalities. The news audience is very much on the edge, jumping across channels or dropping off the moment they find something repetitive and uninteresting. To learn their behavior and optimize video discovery experiences, we need to understand what they are seeing first. This is our foray into that world.

To some of us, this is also like a home coming. I started out my career in Google News, trying to figure how the world of news publishing works, organizing news stories into clusters, figuring out novel reporting among them and crediting the good sources for original work. As the world of news shifts more and more to live video news, much of this fundamental world needs to adapt. Recent technology advances with LLMs have made this much easier to go and solve. There is more to be solved here, and that is coming out soon.

We are open to enterprise licensing models for Live Topics for Live News to be shown on Smart TVs and Connected STBs. Please do write to us at [email protected] if you are interested.