The Associated Press is using "automated journalists” to report company business earnings, according to Cision blogger Bradley Smith, and with artificial intelligence the stories sound like a person crafted each one of them individually.
Smith found out after a client had asked if earnings releases should be written in any special way to get better quality reporting by the AP.
He found out the answer is “No.”
Working backwards from the AP, he contacted Automated Insights, a company that developed the Wordsmith application behind the AP robo-reporters. Wordsmith is an artificial intelligence platform that generates human-sounding narrative articles from raw data.
Automated Insights’ head of communications, James Kotecki, referred Smith to Bryant Sheehy, director of business development at Zacks Investment Research where the raw data for the staries originates.
(Smith said Zacks is trusted by dozens of financial portals including Yahoo!, MarketWatch, NASDAQ, Forbes and Morningstar.)
Zacks extracts data from earnings releases by having people read the information and then manually enter the numbers in a database.
Only the writing aspect of the AP process is automated, said Smith, not the data parsing. At its simplest, the Wordsmith application is a “form letter,” however the sophistication of the AI creates very readable content on an immense scale. It has hundreds of applications including sports reporting and personalized customer letters.