According to a report monitored online Friday 5 August, 2016 the
Washington Post is adding a twist to the reporting of this year Olympics Game
by using Heliograf, a robot software to
cover part of the game.
The Washington Post announced today that it will use artificial intelligence to report key
information about the Olympics.
The software will
contribute The Post’s coverage of Rio 2016 by posting raw data and short
updates, while a team of human reporters will provide readers with analysis and
more in-depth articles.
Heliograf, as the
team calls its robot reporter, will take information from sports data
company Stats.com and turn
it into short narratives.
Starting tomorrow
morning, these multi-sentence updates will appear in the Post’s live blog, on
Twitter at @WPOlympicsbot and via the Post’s bot for Facebook
Messenger. An audio version will be available on Amazon Echo.
The goal is to post more than 300 stories on the live blog
and 600 updates on Twitter, Echo and Messenger during the Olympics, said Jeremy
Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at The Washington Post. The live
blog will feature updates not only from Heliograf, but also from the Post’s
correspondents in Rio and the sports team in DC.
“The goal of
Heliograph is not in any way to eliminate even a single journalism job,” said
Gilbert. “We’ve been hiring like crazy.”
The newsroom overall
has added 140 journalists since Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, according
to the communications department.
“Finding amazing
sources, discovering interesting stories, analyzing things are the things we
want great reporters to focus on,” Gilbert added. “We want humans to tell
stories that only humans can tell.”
Tomorrow,
Heliograf’s first task will be telling the story of the Olympics medals in the
form of one- to three-sentence updates. During the games, the
service will keep readers posted about the schedule of the competitions,
medal results and medals rankings by country, among other things.
As for the editing
part of the process, Gilbert explained: “There won’t be stories that are going
up, either written by humans or written by Heliograf, that won’t be edited by
human editors. That said, we’re going to publish into the live blog and then
we’ll be reviewing.”
Heliograf has a
safety mechanism to check the data, explained Sam Han, engineering director of
data science at the Post. The systems analyzes the data automatically; if any
potential error or suspicious results are identified, Heliograf reports them to
the editorial staff.
The software was
developed in-house starting six months ago by using data from primary
elections during the testing phase.
It’s not the first
time a media outlet has experimented with automated storytelling. In July, AP Sports announced they had
started using “robot” reporters to cover Minor League Baseball.
Heliograf is also going to be part of The Washington Post’s
coverage of the upcoming presidential election.
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