Judging by the number of AI use cases that have popped up over the past few weeks, it looks like the last quarter was jam-packed with experimentation for many news organisations across the world.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has built a bot, ABC Assist, that uses semantic search, an LLM, and RAG to trawl its content so news consumers can quickly find what they are looking for on its Web site.

It also provides links to the source material so readers can quickly verify what they are reading, according to a blog post by ABC: 

“Our product was designed to assist users, not do their jobs for them. The promise of ABC Assist wasn’t that you could ask it a question and just unthinkingly copy and paste its response into an e-mail, or a report, or a presentation.

“As our users have told us repeatedly, the value of ABC Assist for them is as a search tool. In that sense, the answers that it provides are simply gateways to information, and users need to remain in control of how this information then gets used.

“So providing users with not just the information they need, but the original context of that information and a way to dig deeper, is key.”

The broadcaster is now working on letting users apply search filters for the source documents or time period that ABC Assist uses.

Germany’s Handelsblatt is also working on a similar search project, according to Editor-in-Chief Sebastian Matthes. It is also using cloned voices to read out articles and plans to use AI for fact checking, optimising headings, generating summaries, illustrations and graphics, recognising trends, and newspaper layout.

Another public broadcaster, NOS in the Netherlands, has launched an “easy” version of its daily news bulletin, aimed at older people, non-native speakers, and those with learning problems or disrupted education. It will have fewer images, simpler sentence structure, easier language and fewer topics, explained at a slower tempo.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based ESPN is using GenAI to create summaries of games played in the Premier Lacrosse League and National Women’s Soccer League.

“The AI-generated recaps aim to enhance coverage of under-served sports, providing fans with content that was previously unavailable. These sports do not currently have game recaps on ESPN digital platforms, and these AI-generated recaps will be a tool to augment existing coverage — not replace it.” 

Each AI-generated summary will be reviewed by a human editor, bylined “ESPN Generative AI Services,” and will also carry a tagline at the bottom that flags that it was created by AI.

Czech Radio is running its fourth season of a podcast featuring short stories called Digital Writer, in which humans and AI collaborate to produce the content. 

“The good thing to remember about this project is especially that the main goal is not necessarily to produce the best short audio stories that we can,” said Anna Vošalíková, chief dramaturg in charge of digital content at Czech Radio. “We have human writers who write fantastic pieces and those are, in terms of quality, far superior to what we do at Digital Writer. However, it is also important to understand that one of the values of the project lies in the technology that is being used and the technology that is being showcased.”

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