Sharron Melton spent nearly eight years anchoring mornings at CW39 Houston before leaving the station in September. Now she is returning to the airwaves in an unusual way: as an AI-generated version of herself, fronting a new weekday morning newscast called Vocal Wish News that is set to debut Monday, Nov. 9, at 6 a.m.
A Familiar Face, Rebuilt With AI
Melton announced the launch of Vocal Wish News, describing it as an AI-powered weekday morning newscast, according to Chron. The program will feature Melton's AI-generated likeness, which the outlet reports will be clearly labeled for viewers, and it will display sources on screen so audiences can check the reporting themselves. Melton said the newscast uses her voice and likeness with an AI component, per the same report, and the show will stream on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Vocal Wish News operates under Vocal Wish LLC, Melton's independent media company, which also offers voice-over and narration services along with public speaking, event hosting and media training, Chron's reporting indicates. A companion product, the Vocal Wish Morning Brief, is planned to provide additional context and follow-ups that do not fit into the short newscasts. Melton wrote on social media that more projects are coming.
Leaving Local TV After Nearly Eight Years
Melton left CW39 after nearly eight years with the station, the outlet previously reported, noting she had joined KIAH in October 2018 following nearly eight years as a morning anchor at ABC13. Across her broadcast career, Melton has anchored HTOWN Morning News and No Wait Weather and Traffic, previously hosted Morning Dose, and has worked in newsrooms for more than three decades in markets including Miami, Mobile, Alabama, and Roswell, New Mexico. She is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, according to the same account.
Melton has said she values fact-checking, making additional calls and reviewing documents, and that her sourcing rule is that material must be traceable to air. She wrote that that is how trust gets built, one verifiable detail at a time — language that underscores the verification promise built into Vocal Wish News, where sources appear on screen alongside the AI-generated anchor.
Reviving a Podcast, Too
Alongside the newscast, Melton is reviving her YouTube and podcast series, Sharing the Sugar With Sharron, which features long-form interviews with people from around the world. The show launched in March 2017 and produced 41 episodes before going on hiatus in 2020. Its return will include an interview with Houston native Regan Hutsell, who was crowned Miss America 2027 in September, with episodes available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
A Small but Growing Trend in Local News
Melton's project lands amid a handful of early experiments with AI-driven news presentation around the country. In San Antonio, station KSAT 12 planned to debut a mostly anchorless weekday newscast on September 14th that uses an AI voice to read some story teases, according to RuntimeWire. That half-hour program, called The Rundown, was slated to air at 1 p.m. on the station, its website and its free KSAT+ streaming service, covering local news, weather, sports and breaking stories.
A more sprawling example comes from Mirage, which produced a 24-hour experimental newscast featuring four completely AI-generated anchors covering real stories, as reported by Variety. That broadcast reached 50,000 viewers on X, with its livestream post drawing 824,000 impressions, and the generated elements were labeled as artificial.
Public Trust Remains a Hurdle
Surveys suggest audiences remain wary of AI in news production even as newsrooms experiment with it. A May 2026 Gallup survey cited by Variety found that only 7% of Americans rely a great deal or a fair amount on AI to get news, while nearly 40% said a news organization's use of AI would reduce their trust in the information. A 2025 six-country survey from the Reuters Institute found weekly use of generative AI to get news rose from 3% to 6%, still a minority activity, while 51% of respondents perceived generative AI as being used always or often in news media.
Separate research from the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication found two-thirds of respondents believed U.S. news organizations were at least sometimes using AI to generate stories or images, and by a three-to-one margin, respondents reported little or no confidence in newsrooms using AI for those purposes. Fifty-eight percent said they wanted publishers to establish clear ethical guidelines before experimenting with AI in newsrooms, and about half said labels around AI use were essential even when reporters and editors remained involved in confirming information. A separate Reuters Institute survey of 1,004 UK journalists conducted between August and November 2024 found only 2% used AI for video generation at least monthly, suggesting the technology remains far from standard practice inside most newsrooms even as individual projects like Melton's push into new territory.
