News agency from the company Yandex, in which robots will work

Yandex has announced the launch of a new news feed. The event was commented by Maria Petrova, project manager for Yandex for Media. She noted that the proposed format is a news feed for the media and media.

A distinctive feature is that it’s not the writers and journalists who will be involved in content preparation, but the automated system, the search engine algorithm . The text is going to be prepared based on the results of monitoring information and its analysis. The topics of test news covered by the system will be weather and traffic jams. A little later, the range of issues will begin to expand, the project manager promised. More attention will be paid to situations, interest in which is increasing in search services.

It is intended to use several different formats, depending on the type of source. Events are highlighted in live mode. Broadcast information going to TV channels and radio stations. For television will present graphics, and for radio - a text interface. A format for news agencies, print newspapers and magazines, as well as websites in the form of a notification tape will also become available.

All users are provided with a free subscription. 

Several editions are using the news feed today, noted in Yandex. Among the companies that use the services are Interfax and other large organizations.

Yuri Pogorely, Executive Director of Interfax Financial and Economic Information Services, confirmed: for several years, the agency has been receiving Yandex information about traffic jams made by robots and including it in its subscription feeds. Although Interfax itself has a subsidiary agency Finmarket, which has been writing news with robots for 10 years, he notes.

Interfax itself also owns the Finmarket agency, the employees of this organization are robots. They have successfully compiled news for the past 10 years.

This way of creating text content is far from new, but it is still not common. Narrative Science owns this technology.. Quill is a company platform. It is an artificial mind that converts information into text. Among the company's customers is the well-known Forbes magazine. A number of texts that are posted on the website of the publication are not signed by the name of the author, but are signed by Narrative Science. Most often, these are small notes that reflect stock price fluctuations or are dedicated to similar topics.

Also, the developer of the Wordsmith platform, Automated Insights, provided access to a test version of its application for processing text from an array of raw information.

The functionality of the service is as follows: sorting through tables, statistics and comments, the system transforms the information received into a small note. Automated Insights uses resources such as the Associated Pressand Yahoo News. Last spring, when the Los Angeles earthquake began, it was first reported by the robotic program Quakebot. The author of the service is Ken Schwenke, one of the employees of the Los Angeles Times.

The general director of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda Vladimir Sungorkin noted that the data that will come from the Yandex system may interest the media.  

The fact that robotic systems will soon replace ordinary journalists, especially when you need to release short news, has been talked about for a long time.

It will be easy to train the robot to prepare short news articles. First, he is given a spelling algorithm. It indicates what data is indicated at the beginning of the text, which should be described in the middle, and what to look for at the end. A robot can write text that is easy to read by the audience of the site. Often, even journalists neglect the rules of writing articles, mixing the entire flow of information in one sentence, Sungorkin notes.

“Robots are unlikely to be able to completely replace journalists, Pogorely observes: robots will never feel an interesting story - they only answer the questions they are asked.”