In recent years, the news media landscape has been challenged by two international trends: the increasing selective news avoidance by readers and difficulty understanding complex topics, according to the Reuter’s Institute Digital News Report 2023.

According to the report, 30% of people surveyed find barriers to understanding such news on difficult topics. But thanks to AI, news media companies can create gateways to information that they didn’t have in the past.

UalterAI is a new reading assistant that uses Artificial Intelligence to gather and abbreviate information from journalistic articles. It appears in all notes on Clarín.com as a widget beneath the authors’ signatures.

When the reader clicks on the widget, it expands with the contained information. First, a summary appears, covering 10% to 20% of the original text’s length. Alternatively, it presents five analysis modules. The first is bullet points; a list of up to 10 concise sentences that delve into the summary information.

A second analysis module extracts all textual phrases and presents them alongside the names of the individuals who made those statements. All data, numbers, and figures in the text are extracted, classified, and presented in two-column tables for easier comprehension.

Information can also be read as a FAQ, a questionnaire of up to 10 questions and answers that condenses and simplifies the understanding of some news or processes. Finally, the glossary module extracts and classifies the keywords of the text, accompanied by a brief definition.

Making news more inviting

Why is a reading assistant important?

Media companies produce an average of around 250 pieces of content per day. Some media produce slightly less, while others publish much more, up to 1,000. But if we take the average of 250 pieces of text and estimate that each one has approximately 800 words, we reach the monumental figure of 200,000 words published in a single medium — every day.

That is a significant number. 

Humans read at an average of only 238 words per minute. At that reading speed, 200,000 words would demand 15 hours of reading. The content is overwhelming, and readers miss a significant amount of relevant information.

Microdosing the news

UalterAI improves the quality of the information diet by presenting the main information in doses different from the originals, allowing a person to access a greater quantity and quality of information in less time.

The published version of UalterAI is only the first part of a deep process that includes new intelligence about the articles themselves, automatic classification and understanding, and potential distribution across multiple platforms in a personalised manner. Creating summaries and analyses dramatically enriches the entire journalistic edition.

To understand the richness of this dynamic, UalterAI now contains summaries of all articles. These summaries are not only abbreviated texts but also include an understanding of the information they contain.

Additionally, for the first time, a medium like Clarín.com now has all identified and classified words, acronyms, names of people, organisations, and institutions it publishes, numbers, data and figures, and the geographical location of everything reported in the stories.

In the process of creating the reading assistant, an unprecedented intelligence about textual journalistic production emerges with a value still difficult to calculate.

It is a moment of profound and exciting changes in the history of journalism. AI will expand the scope and understanding of news; UalterAI works in that direction.