Robots to cover Rio Olympics 2016 for The Washington Post

Washington D.C, Aug 6: Famous American daily newspaper "The Washington Post" have discovered an unique way to cover the Rio Olympics 2016.

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As per reports, the Post will be using robots to cover some parts of the Olympic games. They are using homegrown software to automatically produce hundreds of real-time news reports about the Olympics.

The procedure has started today (August 6) morning and the contents will appear, without human intervention, on the Post's website, as well as in the social media.

The basic idea is to use artificial intelligence to quickly create simple reports on scores, medal tallies and other data-centric news articles, so that the Washington Post's human journalists can work on better and complex work.

Jeremy Gilbert, who heads up new digital projects for the newspaper was quoted: "We're not trying to replace reporters. We're trying to free them up."

Gilbert along with Sam Han, the paper's head of data science, have a team of three engineers working on Heliograf, the firms AI software.

The idea is not at all complex. As a matter of fact the main thinking behind conceptualising such a process is to increase the efficiency of the journalists and reporters.

The basic things will be auto generated so that the manual workforce can concentrate on better reporting and other work.

Also point to be noted here is that, The Post is not the first media outlet to create this form of journalism.

Narrative Science, started as a Northwestern University experiment, turned baseball box scores into proper stories. Automated Insights does similar work for clients including the Associated Press.

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