About our use of AI

Before launching the channel on August 1st, we showed our first film Scotland in Space to a small random group of people for feedback and our use of an AI voice for the narration was not mentioned by anyone as an issue. In fact, when asked after their feedback, all said they had not realised the voice had been AI-generated.

However, there have been a few people commenting since that the narrator's voice (we've called her Aileen McKinnon) is AI and we've been asked why we use AI at all.

The main reason is that The Scotland Channel 'team' is really just one person, me, at the moment and I have an English accent because I was born in London and lived in England for the first half of my life. I wanted the channel which is about Scotland to be as authentically Scottish as possible by having a Scottish narrator and given the budget and logistic constraints, AI proved to be the best option available at this early stage of the Channel's life.

To successfully use real narrators requires a number of things: sound equipment for them to record their narration in sync with the films produced, the availability of the narrator when they are required, the budget to pay them, whether they live anywhere near to where the films are edited and so on. 

Finding an AI voice with a Scottish accent at all was not easy, most are American and any 'British' voices are all English accents.

However, we found one company, Narakeet, which had five voices with a Scottish accent, and we chose 'Aileen' as the best of the five.

When I put a film together, I play back the voice and ensure that certain words are phonetically spelt to get the correct pronunciation and make it as lifelike as possible.

Of course, we would all prefer to have a real person narrating all our films, and when it's possible to do that, we will. In the meantime, we have to work within the constraints of a small budget to make our films at all and to sustain the channel in its infancy.

There's no doubt that we'd all love to have the money and facilities to operate huge teams out of TV studios, but we don't, although anyone who has a few million to spare, please get in touch!

Until then, our mission is simple: to create entertaining and informative shows about Scotland that are accessible to the widest possible audiences and to make them as good as they can be.