The Associated Press (AP) announced on its official blog that, starting this month, it will begin using a robot software to produce reports on the quarterly financial results of listed companies. This will result in more than 4,400 newsletters instead of the 300 stories inputted manually each quarter.
The robot software was created by Automated Insights to produce reports and financial data of companies tracked by Zacks Investment Research.
The use of this technology, according to the AP vice-president and managing editor, Lou Ferrara, will not result in layoffs. Instead of writing reports based on the financial results, journalists may use the time saved to analyse and explain at more depth what the data means.
“We are going to use our brains and time in more enterprising ways during earnings season,” said Ferrara. “Rather than spend a great deal of time focusing on the release of earnings and hammering out a quick story recapping each one, we are exploring whether we can automate earnings from companies outside the United States.”
According to AP, the robot software will look at whether there are other things that should be automating in this way. Last football season, AP introduced an automated NFL player ranking on the website.
Using robot to produce content is not novelty. Recently The Los Angeles Times had breaking news feeds by using a software application that immediately released information about an earthquake. Narrative Science has developed software that has published stories for Forbes magazine and The Guardian is experimenting a robot-generated newspaper. The stories are selected and laid out with the help of algorithms.
