Narrate

The Narrate project is about creating a new way for people to interact with news and media: instead of just reading or watching, you’ll be able to talk to it through text or audio based interfaces. These “digital narrators” will use conversational AI to deliver stories in a more engaging and personal way. The opportunity comes from the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, but these systems are often unreliable, biased, or untrustworthy. Narrate aims to solve that by building safe, ethical, and personalised conversational storytelling tools that can be used in three fields: (news) media, human resources and engineering software.

The project is a multi disciplinary and international collaboration. VRT plays a central role in the media use case: it will explore how new forms of conversational and interactive storytelling experiences can enhance audience trust and engagement, while making news and general information more accessible and relevant. At the same time, VRT ensures that the project remains grounded in core public values such as neutrality, inclusivity, and media literacy.

Textgain, a spin-off from the University of Antwerp, contributes expertise in AI for Good, focuses on benchmarking and fine-tuning generic open-weight language models for Flemish media applications, developing high-quality AI models based on proprietary VRT data, and jointly exploring suitable generative AI architectures, including knowledge graphs, media-specific routing mechanisms, and ethical guardrailing.

Narrate is part of the European ITEA innovation program, and is funded by VLAIO.

Partners

• Belgium: 3E, SIRRIS, Textgain, VRT

• Estonia: Delfi Meedia AS, Singleton Group OÜ

• Republic of Korea: ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), TESLA SYSTEM CO., LTD

• Spain: Panel Sistemas, UC3M (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

• Türkiye: Innova, Lider Teknoloji Geliştirme, PEAKUP Teknoloji A.S., Puhu Research and Consulting Ltd.