AP’s stories on minor league games are computer generated

Automated Insights, the Durham-based producer of computer-generated written content, has expanded its relationship with the Associated Press to include coverage of minor league baseball games.

The AP announced Thursday that it is now using robo-stories automatically created by Automated Insights’ patented Wordsmith technology for minor league games that the news organization didn’t previously cover. Games of all Triple-A, Double-A and Class A teams – 142 in all – will be covered.

The stories also will appear on the official website of Minor League Baseball, MiLB.com, and on the minor league teams’ websites.

For Automated Insights, “it’s both a good financial deal and we’ll get our name out there on lots of pieces of content associated with AP and MLB,” Robbie Allen, the company’s founder and CEO, said in an interview.

Since 2014, Automated Insights has generated more than 3,500 corporate earnings reports for the AP each quarter.

The earnings stories are generated from data supplied by Zacks Investment Research. The minor league stories will be generated from data supplied by MLB Advanced Media, the official statistician of Minor League Baseball.

In its announcement, the AP also said it is looking at other ways it can use Automated Insights’ technology.

“We continue to explore things with the AP to find areas where there’s data sets that we could leverage to produce stories at a scale that they’re not able to do, and at a cost-efficiency that they’re not able to achieve,” Allen said.

Automated Insights, which has more than 50 employees, was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners and is now a subsidiary of STATS, a sports data company. Automated Insights’ more than 200 customers include Allstate, Edmunds.com and Yahoo!

This story was originally published June 30, 2016 at 6:30 AM with the headline "AP’s stories on minor league games are computer generated."