Vista Investment Fund bought a "journalist robot"

The company Automated Insights is a developer of the service of the same name that automatically tracks news information on the Web and generates news written in "human language". In other words, the script creates news stories that are not much different from those written by human journalists. The service itself is now working for the Associated Press news agency, and entrepreneur Steve Case and Samsung have a hand in creating the technology.

February 12, it became known that the company was bought by the American investment fund Vista Equity Partners and the company STATS LLC. Unfortunately, so far the amount of the transaction has not been disclosed. The total investment that the Automated Insights service has attracted over the entire period of its existence was $ 11 million. Representatives of the startup reported that "the shareholders are very pleased with the funds received, and we are in a confident financial position."

It is worth noting that STATS LLC is a company that deals with sports statistics, its Vista fund was acquired last June. Now the “robot journalist” will pay more attention to sports news, and not just general and financial news.
')

What does a robot journalist do?

The script itself works very well - it is almost impossible to distinguish the generated news from the one written by a human journalist. True, under each generated news indicates that it was created by Automated Insights. The developers note that in the first few months of the script, the generated news was checked by journalists who ruled the bottlenecks. But there were fewer and fewer of those, and since October of last year the news has stopped editing.

You do not need to think that as a result of using the work of the news generation service, the Associated Press dismissed their employees. No, the company’s management reports that no one was dismissed for this reason, and people journalists now have much more time to work with articles, analytical materials and reviews. A technical, boring job entrusted to the script. According to Kevin Ruz, a journalist for New York Magazine, media workers do not like writing short, dry notes.

Now, besides the Associated Press, the service works at Comcast, Yahoo and Samsung. The total number of partner companies that use the services of the service is more than 90. The maximum productivity of the service, according to the creators, is 2,000 news materials per minute. True, so far such volumes are not needed. Currently, the service generates about 3 thousand news every quarter .

What's next?

After the change of owners, the developer company will receive more funds to develop new features and add new features. It is possible that Automated Insights will have more customers, and the range of topics the script works with will expand.

However, Automated Insights is now competing. The company Narrative Science, for example, is engaged in the generation of content for Forbes.com, financial news. Narrative Science had even more investments than Automated Insights - since 2010, the company has received about $ 32 million.

According to some experts, after a decade almost all the news, news notes, will be generated by scripts. At the same time, human journalists will not be left "overboard", just the amount of news content will increase, because every year network users need more information.