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This oversea article on data journalism is an article about Automated Insights’ Word Smith.
<WIRED>
KLINT FINLEY
Articles dated March 6, 2015
In the future, robots will write articles about you
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Here is a robot reporter. This week AP announced that it will use software that automatically generates articles about college sports that have not been covered before. Specifically, the content creation tool is ‘Word Smith’ created by Automated Insights, a company based in Durham, North Carolina
This is the most recent case in which large media companies use algorithms to create content. AP, an investor in Automated Insights, already uses Word Smith to write an article on the quarterly earnings report. Meanwhile, the automation content competitor, Narrative Science, provides similar services for publishing Fortune and Big Ten Networks. And journalists in the Los Angeles Times used custom software to write articles about what happened last year when an earthquake struck in Los Angeles. But is anyone actually reading the machine-generated content? Robbie Allen, CEO of Automated Insights, said it was not a good question. Despite the fact that the company has created billions of content for the year 2014, this prosperity was not for the masses. Rather, Word Smith was a personal data scientist who searched a large amount of data to produce a report with one reader.
For example, the company created a summary of fantasy football games for tens of thousands of Yahoo users during the fantasy football game season. And it has helped to turn the confusing spreadsheet into a short, human-readable report.
One day you may have your own personal robots journalist who collects daily about your fitness data and personal finance stories.
“We’ve changed the traditional content creation model in our minds,” he said. “Instead of one story with one pageview, we’ll have 10,000 stories with a pageview of one.”
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Building Wordsmith Development of Word Smith
Word Smith basically does two things. First, it swallows a bunch of structured data and analysis to find interesting points in a particular game, such as what a player does not do as well as they expected. It then creates these insights into documents that people can read. Think of it as a very complex form of Mad Libs.
Allen recalled this idea eight years ago when he worked as an engineer at Cisco. Allen, who wrote 10 books, wanted to create something new. So, he decided to combine his passion for computer science, writing, and sports analysis into a company called StatSheet.
“It was not attractive to me to hire a large number of writers,” he said. “What is interesting about sports is that 90 percent of what you do is about numbers.”
Soon, however, Allen realized that the idea could not be applied to sports as well as to any quantitative data. So, the company changed its name to Automated Insights to bring the technology to industries in a variety of sectors such as finance, health care, and journalism.
No Brainer It’s so easy to decide
Today, WordSmith is available only with structured quantitative data such as spreadsheets and databases that are well organized. Allen said other companies could create more sophisticated software for automation research, short essays, press rewriting, and unstructured data identification for insights.
But he had doubts that Automated Instances would be deviated from the roots of quantitative research into a predictable future.
Last month, the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, a private company that owns sports data company STATS and business intelligence firm TIBCO. Through collaboration with other companies in Vista, Automated Insights will be more aggressive, Allen said. “This is too easy for us,” he said. “We have so many opportunities for structured data before us. Why do people have to occupy space that they have fought for years? “
In the meantime, expect to see more stories written for you, a very specific audience.
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