Machine-generated text creation is a relief for copywriters and content managers in e-commerce. Anyone involved in writing texts benefits from it. There are two key technologies: generative AI and rule-based data-to-text systems. Most have already had their first experiences with generative AI, most notably GPT. But how do these two technologies differ in terms of […]
The Case
The online news portal news.de reports daily on the latest news, headlines, photos, and videos from a wide variety of departments. Readers can follow current events, important press conferences, and sporting highlights in the live ticker on the homepage.
In addition, news.de set itself to publish up-to-date, high-quality reports on the latest developments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the company needed content for a large number of categories. It was important that they were created and updated on a daily basis.
The Challenge
It is not possible for the staff of news.de to manually write repetitive reports for a large number of categories.
Their goals:
- Fast and accurate access to information for readers
- Daily and up to date reporting
- Reduce employee workload
The Solution
news.de knew it had to find a way to produce an enormous amount of news reports each day. The company decided to use AX Semantics' software for automated content creation.
Automation of daily reports
news.de can automate its news with the content automation software from AX Semantics. For example, the daily coverage of the COVID-19 virus was automated based on structured data from the Robert Koch Institute. In this case, news.de used DataCater to set up the data pipelines that extracted data from various APIs of the Robert Koch Institute, prepared it for text production, and sent it to the AX Semantics NLG Cloud. From the data, AX Semantics NLG Cloud automatically generated optimized texts that were sent to news.de's content management system.Increasing the quality, accuracy and speed of reporting
With the help of content automation software from AX Semantics, the company can provide its readers with faster and more accurate access to information in a wide range of categories. For example, with Corona Reporting, daily reports on current incidence, deaths, new infections, ICU bed occupancy, and incidence trends over the past 6/7 days were generated at the touch of a button for each of the more than 400 districts. In addition, there were daily reports provided on the situation in the individual federal states, on the incidence of infection in Germany, on the current vaccination status in Germany, and the federal states with a vaccination overview. news.de also generated incidence figures for the districts per federal state and offered its readers overview tables with the most important figures.Reducing the workload for employees
The news.de employees could not manually write the required daily reports on current news, headlines, photos, and videos from the most diverse categories because the workload would be too significant. Automated reporting relieves employees of a lot of work.
Example of a generated German report about Covid-19 numbers and regulations
The Results
By using AX Semantics to automate COVID-19 reports, news.de delivered more than 25,000 article updates for more than 400 regions in Germany and reached a local audience of more than 800,000 new visitors per month.Using DataCater to build and manage data pipelines, news.de saves approximately 40% of the time otherwise spent manually building code. This leads to robustness in the data preparation processes.
