The European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Alexis Allemann, Sebastien Noir, and HEIG-VD-professor Andrei Popescu-Belis were awarded the prestigious Best Technical Paper at IBC2025. Their achievement stems from developing a groundbreaking AI-powered chatbot designed to deliver trusted news content. Their paper, “EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration,” impressed judges with its technical depth, innovative methodology, and significance to the media industry and the public.
NEO, developed in collaboration with EBU Members, particularly Swedish Radio, tackles concerns regarding the quality, bias, and transparency of commercial AI-powered news assistants. The team optimized a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, grounding large language models in reliable sources. It uses the EBU Digital News Hub’s extensive database of verified content and the PEACH AI framework for personalization and recommendation services. The result is a multilingual chatbot supported by a database of articles, with approximately 3,000 new stories added daily. This allows journalists and the public to explore current affairs with increased confidence in editorial standards and transparency. The chatbot prioritizes editorial integrity and trust fundamental to public service media.
Paul Entwistle, Chair of the IBC Technical Papers Committee and Peer Review Panel, praised the work, stating: “The paper was very well written, providing an excellent technical disclosure, innovative improvements, detailed performance comparisons and a case study with important lessons on deploying a public-facing AI. The topic itself, trusted news in the age of AI, is critically important, with the EBU uniquely positioned to develop such a system. The paper highlights the scale and complexity of the task, the impressive capabilities that AI can bring, as well as reminding us of its current limitations. This is excellent work – and significant beyond our own industry.”
The award highlights the EBU and its members' role in shaping trustworthy journalism in an AI-driven world. NEO demonstrates how artificial intelligence can strengthen the values of accuracy, impartiality, and transparency in public service media. The formal presentation of the paper will take place at the IBC 2025 Conference in Amsterdam on Saturday, September 13th, at 13:30 CEST.