Forbes Media chief products officer Lewis Dvorkin says he's impressed but not surprised that, in almost every case, his cyber-stringers nail the essence of the company they're reporting on. Major screwups are not unheard-of with flesh-and-blood scribes, but Dvorkin hasn't heard any complaints about the automated reports. "Not a one," he says.
The Narrative Science team also lets clients customize the tone of the stories. "You can get anything, from something that sounds like a breathless financial reporter screaming from a trading floor to a dry sell-side researcher pedantically walking you through it," says Jonathan Morris, COO of a financial analysis firm called Data Explorers, which set up a securities newswire using Narrative Science technology. Other clients favor bloggy snarkiness.
Narrative Science, it so happened, was well placed to accommodate such demands. When the company was just getting started, meta-writers had to painstakingly educate the system every time it tackled a new subject. But before long they developed a platform that made it easier for the algorithm to learn about new domains. For instance, one of the meta-writers decided to build a story-writing machine that would produce articles about the best restaurants in a given city.
For now, though, journalism remains at the company's core. And like any cub reporter, Narrative Science has dreams of glory—to identify and break big stories. To do that, it will have to invest in sophisticated machine-learning and data-mining technologies. It will also have to get deeper into the business of understanding natural language, which would allow it to access information and events that can't be expressed in a spreadsheet. It already does a little of that.