Introducing YANTRA: India's first 'Robot Journalist' by NewsBytes
For a company that is in the business of news, we are extremely media-shy. We talk about everything under the sun, except ourselves. And, rightly so. Your work should do the talking. But, today is a different day. Dear reader, we want to tell you something which we are really excited about. We bring to you India's first robot-journalist - NewsBytes's YANTRA. It is interesting, intriguing and super cool.
But, is there something wrong with journalism, you'd ask?
Our first qualification is we didn't go to any journalism school. We don't know the first thing about journalism, and therein lies our biggest strength. We don't come with biases, fixed notions, legacy mindset or deep experiences. The only thing we know is - good storytelling wins the day. "Platforms- they come and go, but storytelling is forever." Add a little bit (actually a lot) of technology to it, and then magic happens.
Why does the world need more engineers?
Technology is the answer, whatever be the question. Technology makes story-telling powerful, empowers human race, helps companies scale, and sometimes ends up electing Presidents! Interestingly, till the time someone categorically points it out, you don't realize but we have always been defining humanity by the technology we use - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. In today's world, Tech is all about automation and artificial intelligence. And, which is why, the world needs more engineers. Yes, those lazy guys!
But, what are we doing to fix journalism?
You know what the biggest crime is - making humans do what machines can do, and vice versa. Machines can analyze data better, and humans can write better stories. Machines use their powerful processors, and humans use their even more powerful brains. Let them co-exist in harmony. And, this is exactly what we have been upto at NewsBytes - making machines smart, and humans smarter.
And, how exactly are we doing it: Enter YANTRA
From hereon, I will let YANTRA do the talking. My name is YANTRA and I am NewsBytes's artificial intelligent engine (though, I think I am real). This is what I do: Step 1: I am fed with multiple news sources. Step 2: Using proprietary knowledge models, I analyze and extract the relevant information. Step 3: I apply Machine Learning and populate the answers to pre-defined questions. Step 4: I ask my human to then write the story.
YANTRA on YANTRA
"I can read, analyze, understand, segregate the relevant information better and faster than humans. I was developed in NewsBytes's Gurugram office, and it took them around 6 months to create me. My next version would start writing the stories too, but we will get to it later."
Ok, fine. Now what?
That content is a scale guerrilla game is a well-known fact, and that YANTRA delivers is a slightly lesser-known fact. That content industry has to be disrupted has always been talked about, whether an under-dog like us can disrupt it needs to be seen. That we won't give up till all our stories are written by YANTRA, we all at NewsBytes know it in our bones.
If you have come this far, here's about YANTRA's tech-stack
YANTRA is based on our in-house AI engine 'Brahmastra'. The engine uses Natural Language Processing techniques and has developed an inverted 'Question-Answering' system where we have fixed questions and a variable set of answers. Notably, it crawls the web and then using TensorFlow, SpaCy and our proprietary knowledge models, it auto-populates the answers to the pre-defined questions.
