In need of a bit of inspiration? Let me tell you about a small newsroom doing extremely innovative audience-facing work with generative AI. 

I’m talking about Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication founded in 2014 and currently counts about 35 employees. (To everyone who hates the well-resourced New York Times repeatedly being held up as an example to emulate — this one is for you.)

What they are doing is remarkable: building a generative user interface, which provides a high degree of personalisation in real time, customised to fit the needs of its audience. In fact, they are working on seven different ways in which text can be converted to another interface. 

Take a look at one of them: a slider the reader controls so they can receive information in as much or as little detail as they like. You can see the different options in these four screenshots demonstrating Scroll’s ability to provide different levels of complexity in text:

As with any newsroom, implementing personalisation has been a process.

“The biggest complaint about content personalisation, especially from an editorial point of view, is that the editor says, you know, the user may want cat videos all day; are we meant to give them cat videos all day?” said Sannuta Raghu, who leads Scroll’s AI Lab. 

This solution conforms to the editors’ intuition for what is relevant and important as a first draft of history while also making news accessible through different formats, she said. “How do we make it more accessible to users in terms of the knowledge and the value they're taking away from it?”

Another format Scroll is working on is converting text content into a calculator.

For example, coverage of the recent Indian federal budget included 2,000-word articles, 500-word articles, and quotes from the finance minister on what the new tax rate slabs are, a topic Scroll users care about.

“Is the article the best way to put this forward? Or are we able to do this as a calculator, for example?” Raghu asked.

Scroll has two employees working on this project full time and plans to launch a product by September that treats content as raw material for the user interaction.

“The very, very broad plan is to build a system where if you put in an article, it decides what the best format could be and spits it out at the other side, depending on understanding context and understanding the type of story. I don’t think we are there yet, but ideally what we want to do is to take a particular story and turn it into any of these formats at the push of a button.”

As with many innovations, the story behind this one started somewhere else. Raghu’s small team needed to produce social and short videos to cater to strong demand in the Indian market, where 600 million people have access to smartphones and cheap Internet data. But they did not have the bandwidth to create short shelf-life videos, which typically took five or six hours each to produce.

“We started working on what was essentially text to video,” she said, and that project, supported by a grant from Google, led them to these interfaces. “We are thinking of disaggregating the whole workflow and sort of separating text to text, text to social cards, and text to video, and then with the added text to interface element as well.”

By the way, the team now produces about 20 such videos a day. It can produce many more, but the constraint is now that editors like to look over the output before publishing, and they cannot handle more than 20 a day.

Want to hear Raghu speak and ask her your questions? She will be presenting at our GenAI Master Class in April — sign up here.

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