How Computers Freelance as Journalists

Image courtesy of knovelblogs.com

           In today's society we rely heavily on computers and technology, therefore there are large amounts of data associated with our everyday activities. For years now people have been looking for a way out of sorting through these enormous piles of data in order to find the information they are seeking or just to be able to understand what they are looking at. Narrative Science, a start-up company coming out of Chicago, has created a program that can sort through large quantities of data and actually write a report about the information.  By write a report, I don't mean spitting out a chart or table that summarizes the information, but actually a written report with words and sentences. Computer programs are no longer only for sorting and organizing large amounts of data so that it can be more easily understood, but now they can comprehend the information and put out a report summarizing that data.
          This program, Quill, processes data based on the specifications that you provide, such as who will be reading the report and what you want to see included in the report. Quill has been around for a few years now and has been put into practice by a variety of companies in an assortment of industries. Have you ever wondered how sports networks can post summaries about games or plays within minutes of the actual event? This was one of the earliest applications of Quill, but it is also being used by Forbes magazine to post articles about company's financial performances and trends. Although the purpose of the software is not specifically to write articles for magazines, it is one of the functions available.
          The main purpose of this software is to produce internal reports for a company about a variety of different data sets. Sorting through the large data sets can be expensive and time consuming for an organization, especially as the amount of data increases. Therefore, Quill can function in place of the people who would normally be assigned to data sorting and save the organization countless hours and money that would be typically dedicated to this task. Quill provides easy to understand and efficient data processing capabilities that allow organizations to have readily available information for real-time use. The purpose of artificial intelligence programs such as Quill is to analyze the information give in a way that is easy to understand and meets the specifications that you request.
          Artificial intelligence programs are gaining popularity on the market, but not without criticism from those who see computers as taking jobs away from human-beings. Quill does take the task of data processing away from a human-being, but there are few people who can process thousands of bits of information from spreadsheets and charts with the efficiency and accuracy that Quill offers. As we become more dependent on technology, the amount of data we produce will only increase, making it even more important for programs such as this to save time and resources typically dedicated to the task.