Google Funds Software Radar that will Automate Writing Local News

A bad news for all journalists, Google Funds Software Radar that will Automate Writing Local News. Google has revealed to provide  $805,000 to a British news agency with the task to build a new software. This software would be able to automate the writing of 30,000 local stories a month.

The profit gained by Digital news, a project of Google, will be utilized for this purpose. The search engine invested over
$170 million over Digital News Initiative to support digital innovation in newsrooms across Europe.

Google Funds Software Radar that will Automate Writing Local News

This project will be accomplished by press association in partnership with Urbs Media. Urbs media is an automation software startup. Both companies will work on a software project dubbed radar, which stands for reporters and data and robots.

Radar will automate local reporting collaborating large database from government and law enforcement agencies. In other words Radar will robotize the work of reporters.

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Data related to stories will be penned using Natural Language Generation that converts raw data into words. However robotic reporters will not be working alone. There would be five journalist to cross check and edit new articles generated from Radar. Press association in collaboration with Urbs media are trying to add images and videos to robot made stories.

Peter Clifton, the editor in chief of the Press Association said:

Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process. But Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.

The radar project plans to cover issues of local importance, searching into government data sets to find stories that are important. Clifton explained that this type of automated reporting will take a lot of time.

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