With $240,000 from The Knight Foundation, Quartz is launching a bot studio to experiment with new ways to reach audiences.
The Quartz Bot Studio will experiment with bots and artificial intelligence, identify best practices and share its learnings online.
“Bots and AI are going to upend how people get information,” said Zach Seward, senior vice president of product and executive editor at Quartz, in a press release. “We’re excited to launch more experiments that take advantage of recent advances in natural language processing, machine learning, conversational interfaces, and so on.”
Bots have become an increasingly important tool for news organizations. BuzzFeed used one to help cover this year’s political conventions. Vermont Public Radio used a bot to track sewage spills. Several news organizations have used bots to interact with their audiences, with mixed results
