Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Ahead of us, there are two roads:

A future based on artificial intelligence, building toward a real understanding of what a person is saying, then generating the right response. This is hard to do with a high degree of accuracy, and leads to all sorts of potentially creepy sci-fi futures.

A future of controllable, scripted responses to a fixed set of commands. These bots may be full of personality and generate complex scripts, but their understanding is basic, and they can’t guarantee a nuanced response.

Choosing the right road means choosing the right way to understand the other side of the conversation. To what degree should a bot anticipate what’s happening on the other side of the wall?...

Four years ago, The Washington Post covered two major news events the old-fashioned way.

For the Olympics in London, sports reporters tallied up the medal counts on television and hand-wrote briefs for the website. And when the election came around a few months later, four Post scribes took a look at election returns and hand-wrote lots of little results stories — who won what, and where.

This year, that work is being done by robots. Kind of.

Earlier today, The Washington Post announced it's joining the growing number of news organizations who are using language-generation technology to produce stories automatically.

Heliograf, a tool developed by The Washington Post's engineering team, will use data and language templates to generate automatic briefs on medal tallies, event schedules and competition results for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Those briefs will be fed into The Washington Post's main Olympics liveblog, which will also be home to stories written by the newspaper's sports reporters....