- Related Stories
-
Divining AI, and the future of consumer robotics
July 20, 2006 -
American workers: Lazy or creative?
September 5, 2005
Robo-reporters have answered Thomson Financial's need to churn out lightening-quick earnings stories.
Computers are writing some business stories for Thomson, a business-information provider, according to a company representative. Against a backdrop where consumers of financial news are always clamoring for speedy information to help them with stock deals, and corporations the world over are fixed on automation, Thomson says that computer scribes can spit out an earnings story in 0.3 seconds after the results have been made public.
Most human reporters can't create a blank Microsoft Word document that fast.
To determine how a company fared in a quarter, the computer takes the current financial figures and automatically compares them with the data of previous years. Moreover, computers make far fewer mistakes than humans, Thompson told the Financial Times.
What's unclear is how a PC will stand up to accusations of a liberal bias.
See more CNET content tagged:
Thomson Corp., PC
Please find an example of the robo-written story and link to it, so
we can see for ourselves.
- It's a reality.
- by flashtogo August 23, 2006 5:02 AM PDT
- What must be considered is that many journalists do write as
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(7 Comments)robots themselves so, for that, a computer is best skilled.
Whenever there is a need for a profile, or for "telling the whole
story", or for a more complex analysis you will need humans to
write. Now, for simply day-by-day mechanical reports of up's
and down's, where the text looks like extracted from a template
anyway, a computer can certainly do a better job.
What journalists can do to protect their jobs is to do exactly
what they are supposed to, telling a story, interpreting the data,
seeing between the lines and beyond the numbers.
Marcos Figueira
CEO, http://FlashToGo.com