Much has been made in the mainstream media about software systems that can take lots of data (previously gathered via tedious methods) and create a wide range of prose from nonfinancial news to reports about the performance of funds.
FTF News was so intrigued that we’ve put together a special report on the subject, “Will a Software Robot Be Writing Your Next Financial Report?.”
To provide a high-level oversight, our reporter Louis Chunovic has found that cutting-edge and relatively new vendors like Narrative Science, Automated Insights and Yseop are grafting software code and algorithms to create systems that can write copy from data. This is proving to be extremely useful to sports journalists and CIA analyst that have to sift through gigabytes or more of data to provide a statistical analysis in prose. These labor-intensive tasks take lots of energy and attention that could be better applied to more forward-looking, high-level activities.
The vendors are looking at many industries, including financial services. Narrative Science’s flagship offering is Quill, which has many versions targeting particular industries. Automated Insights’ main product is Wordsmith while Yseop makes Smart NLG and Smart Machine. All of these systems can be customized to take on the financial services sector.
Some big names have gotten on board such as Credit Suisse and the CIA, users of wares from Narrative Science, the Associated Press is applying software from Automated Insights, and Société Générale is said to be a client of Yseop.
These software systems are making it easier for journalists and analysts because they can plow through the data and spit out usable prose. The humans overseeing these efforts can add polish, provide quality assurance, and apply analysis and creativity to the raw prose. Essentially, though, these systems are taking over a rather mind-numbing chore and completing it faster than most humans.
This has obvious benefits that can be applied to financial reports sent to investors and other market participants. Our report explores the concerns over whether investors will be getting reliable data and whether humans have a chance to check the “robot’s” usage and analysis of the data.
Without giving away the ending, the insights from our investigation will surprise you as the industry begins to grasp the usefulness of these systems. There is every reason to consider that a robot-writer may be in your future. In fact, Stuart Frankel, co-founder and CEO of Narrative Science, argues in the report that narrative-creation algorithms could easily become ubiquitous over the coming years. “It’s hard to imagine that there won’t be a spreadsheet or a table or some type of business intelligence package that won’t have an automatic narrative generation capability built in,” he says.
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