THIS time, the newscaster was also the news.

While the Philippines was commemorating Holy Week, the world's first virtual newscaster made her debut on April 19 at www.ananova.com. Ananova is the much-hyped "human" face of the real-time computer system behind news and information portal Ananova.com, which is basically the new name and direction for the existing Press Association NewsCentre. If you'd still like to get information on PA and its other news services, go to www.pressassociation.press.net.

Like her human counterparts, the green-haired computer-generated Ananova reads out the breaking news. Unfortunately, it just so happened that one of the breaking news items at the time was the tragic Air Philippines crash--this was just before the launch of Ananova. To access the video launchpad, you need a media player like RealNetworks RealPlayer.

While the site is UK-based, her developers decided not to give Ananova a British accent, to make her accessible to more surfers as supposedly many are turned off by Received English. Well, that makes this virtual babe--who reminds people of Posh Spice, Kylie Minogue or their own selves--a notch above some real-life newscasters with their artificial rendition of the Queen's English.

I wasn't able to catch Ananova's historic first broadcast even though I browsed the site several times on April 19--Ananova's creators wanted to keep everyone coming back to the site by refusing to divulge the exact time of the launch and staying online interminably would have finished up the prepaid Net access cards I stocked up for the Holy Week break.

I was, however, able to enjoy one of Ananova's webcasts. Well, maybe enjoy isn't exactly the right term, because while Ananova is a cool newscaster, the curse of a dial-up connection (even with a 56k modem) puts a damper on even the most exciting interactive web-based media event. As expected, I was doomed to watch her webcast through the small RealPlayer screen reserved for the blokes with low-bandwidth connections.

According to the site, these were Ananova's historic first words: "Hello World! Here's the news--and this time it's personal." Unfortunately, I couldn't get the clip of those first words to play--c'mon, chaps, why'd you use the bandwidth-hogging AVI format instead of streaming media?

So how does Ananova get the news and read it out to us? While you might think she's just a looker, a powerful digital mind powers Ananova, enabling the real-time system to gather news as they break.

Ananova is also equipped with her own search engine focusing on specific interests such as news and sports items. Also, the headers of the different news packets are tagged in such a way so that Ananova would know what facial expression is appropriate to the particular news item. As she put it, "I don't want to smile when I am telling you about a sad story, or be too serious when I'm reading something funny!" Again, that makes her superior to some human newscasters.

This info is then fed to the text-to-speech application that powers her voice, while live animation technology tries to keep her image in synch with the audio. Ananova noted how difficult it was to learn a human language, particularly English where sometimes the same word can be pronounced in more than one way and mean another thing. Moreover, she added that the bigger challenge is for her to learn words she has never come across before, though adding that continuous advancements in technology would help her improve. Think HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey," though let's hope without the digital nervous breakdown.

One of the goals of her developers is to make people interested in Ananova's "personality"--talk about giving a human face to the news and technology. Those who'd like to know more about what makes Ananova, er, tick can go to www.ananova.com/a-files/. It's not yet as interactive as I'd like it to be, but you do get a fascinating glimpse into Ananova's character. For instance, you could read about her "childhood" and look at images of her earlier renditions. It was in April last year when her creators first came up with the idea of a real-time news and information system, and later with the brilliant concept of coming up with a human personality for that system. This has spawned a lot of interest among surfers--some fans have even put up unofficial online shrines way before the launch, such as Club Ananova at www.clubananova.com.

In case you think Ananova is just a lot of hype and an exercise in vanity, she is supposed to help revolutionize the way we receive and interact with the news on the Web. Nor would she and other virtual assistants be relegated to the PC or laptop, but connected to mobile devices like palmtops and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) phones. An example is Mya (www.mya.com), another virtual person scheduled for debut in June, who will be able to read e-mail for you using cellular phone technology.