News agency Reuters is using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically identify breaking news stories. The company's research and development team has created a system called Reuters Tracer, which uses Twitter to monitor news events as they happen. It then compares this with a database of topics that the Reuters team has gathered from tweets produced by 31 official news accounts, such as @CNN, @BBCBreaking, and @nytimes as well as news aggregators like @BreakingNews. The system automatically selects the most relevant and writes a headline and summary, which are then sent around the company's global distribution channels. The software analyses around 12 million tweets a day, half of which come from accounts curated by Reuters journalists, and half of which are randomly sampled. In addition to being able to detect trending topics, the AI can also spot when stories have been picked up on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
News agency Reuters is using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically identify breaking news stories. The company's research and development team has created a system called Reuters Tracer, which uses Twitter to monitor news events as they happen. The system automatically selects the most relevant and writes a headline and summary, which are then sent around the company's global distribution channels. The software analyses around 12 million tweets a day, half of which come from accounts curated by Reuters journalists, and half of which are randomly sampled. In addition to being able to detect trending topics, the AI can also spot when stories have been picked up on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.