In a head-turning move, business software suite behemoth Salesforce is absorbing AI writing pioneer Narrative Science into its empire.
The move highlights just how much AI-generated writing is becoming a ‘must-have’ for even the most established of software tools.
For more than a decade, AI pioneer Narrative Science made its bones showing companies how to auto-write easy-to-understand business reports that mined info from company databases.
During that time, it also established itself as a standard for automated writing.
Salesforce’s plan is to integrate Narrative Science’s technology into its business intelligence tool, Tableau.
The two toolmakers are already well-acquainted.
During the past few years, Narrative Science successfully worked with Tableau’s computer scientists to develop a Narrative Science plug-in for Tableau.
Observes Stuart B. Frankel, CEO, Narrative Science: “This combination will help us reach millions more people who are underserved with data.”
(For an in-depth look at the growing trend in auto-generated company reports, check-out, “Company Reports That Write Themselves,” by Joe Dysart.)
In other AI-generated writing news:
*In-Depth Guide: Writesonic: Add Writesonic to the bevy of AI writers vying for your business.
Jameson Steward offers an excellent, step-by-step guide on how to get the most from the tool in this piece.
Specifically, Steward shows you how you can use Writesonic to:
~Develop topic ideas based on a keyword input
~Gin-up an intro for an article or post
~Auto-generate article outlines
~Auto-generate a full article — which albeit may need editing, formatting and grammar correction
Other capabilities offered by Writesonic include text summaries, content rephrasing, sentence expanding and readability checking.
As always, it’s imperative you give any AI auto-writer a thorough test-drive before you part with any cash, if possible.
You can also check-out critical takes on Writesonic from actual users on these pages on G2Crowd and Capeterra.
*AI-Generated Literature: The State-of-the-Art: Drew Zeiba offers a 30,000-foot view of the state of AI-generated creative writing in this piece.
Essentially, it’s a quick study of what literary practitioners of AI-generated writing have come up with so far — and where they may be heading.
Observes Zeiba: “Though today’s AI and algorithmic tech present no shortage of threats or concerns—ranging from wooden prose to automated racism to excessive energy usage—they probably won’t automate-away the novelist or the poet. “
*Canadian University Launching Robotic News Service: Ryerson University is preparing to launch a professional automated news service, which will feed its stories to the Canadian Press Wire Service.
The new venture will be staffed by student journalists and data analysts, who will help run fresh data through story templates to auto-generate news stories.
Ryerson will be focusing on creating hyperlocal news stories with its service.
It’s a similar approach used by Radar, a UK-based automated news service.
Radar has been auto-generating highly localized news stories using hyperlocal data for a few years now.
*IBM Working on AI Text Analysis for Watson: Big Blue is promising new AI text analysis tools for users of its Watson supercomputer.
Specifically, the tools are being designed to:
~Better enable Watson to work in the writing style of a specific company
~Better enable Watson to find business-specific text patterns in business documents
~Better enable Watson to automate tasks needed for basic contract writing
*AI Writing Assistant Hits $21 Million Jackpot: AI writing tool Writer has snared a hefty $21 million in new funding.
The AI app is designed to help companies auto-polish marketing copy.
Plus, it also helps company writers adhere to a common brand writing style.
Observes Kyle Wiggers, a writer for VentureBeat: “On the AI side, Writer employs an engine that evaluates things like plagiarism, sentence complexity, tone, paragraph length, spelling and grammar, formality, active voice usage, and other key metrics.
“Beyond this, the platform lets companies create a ‘single source of truth’ for brand terms.”
*AI Conversation Analyzer Snags $17 Million in Funding: Symbl.ai has raked in $17 million in new investment funding to help further develop its conversation analysis tool.
The software uses AI to distill meaning and context from conversations it analyzes that are carried on via text, email, social media, chat, voice and video.
Says Symbl.ai CEO Surbhi Rathore: “We are bullish on empowering builders with the right toolkit to unlock the value in conversation data across all digital channels.”
*Interface for Supercomputer Level Auto-Text Generators Snags $12.7 Million: Interface builder Matium is flush with new cash.
The company specializes in forging easy-to-use interfaces for highly complex auto-text writers like GPT-3.
Specific complex auto-text writers Matium builds interfaces for includes auto-writers from GPT-3, EleutherAI, AI21, Cohere — and in the near future, Hugging Face.
*JournalismAI Gears for Online Conference, Nov. 29 – Dec. 3: Journalism think-tank Polis is hosting an online conference emphasizing the positive impact of AI in journalism.
Dubbed the JournalismAI Festival, the online meet will essentially be a free crash course on AI and journalism — serving up talks and presentations from numerous experts and practitioners of AI-driven journalism.
You can get a feel for what the conference will be like by checking out videos recorded at the group’s conference from last year.
Underwritten by the Google News Initiative, the fest offers editors, writers and AI programmers an up-to-the moment look at how AI is changing the news business — presented by companies, news publishers and other AI experts gung-ho about that change.
*AI Big Picture: Brain/Computer Interfaces: The Quest Goes on For Thought-to-Text Auto-Writers: After 20-plus years, a reliable thought-to-text auto-writer still eludes researchers.
Even so, they’ve already done some remarkable, groundbreaking work, using electrodes, software and computers to translate thought directly into text in a rudimentary way.
This fascinating article in Wired offers an update on science’s tantalizing mission to someday easily ‘read’ what’s going on in someone’s mind using technology.
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.