China-developed news robot passes Rio Olympic test

A piece of sports news produced by news robot "Xiaoming" on toutiao.com.

The first Artificial Intelligence (AI) news robot specializing in editing sports news in China reportedly performed its duty well during the Rio Olympic Games, according to a report in Hong Kong's by Economic Times.

The robot named "Xiaoming" was developed by Peking University and toutiao.com, an online news portal on the Chinese mainland.

"Xiaoming" can produce a news report just 2 seconds after the end of a sports event, and produced over 450 pieces of sports news during the Olympic Games. Each piece of its work was read some 11 thousand times. Hooked up to an Olympic database, "Xiaoming" can also choose appropriate pictures for each news item it creates.

The first time that a robot was used to edit news was back in 2009 in the United States. It's now becoming more commonplace with the Associated Press of the United States starting to use robots in news editing in July 2014. In China, Tencent was said to be the first to try a news robot in its business news reporting in September 2015, followed by the Xinhua News Agency.

Developers of "Xiaoming" say the news robot can be a good partner to human beings as it can be very quick in editing news that involves lots of data. However, news robot is still far from replacing human beings especially in editing news about significant events which needs a much more analytical approach.