Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Automating the Newsroom: The AP's Robot Copy Editor

If only we could automate government and do away with the courtier-politicians.
From Poynter:

AP’s new Lingofy plugin is like a robot copy editor
Lingofy is a browser plugin that “checks website content for AP Stylebook’s spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style guidelines,” the Associated Press says in a press release. The for-purchase plugin also checks against Webster’s New World College Dictionary, the primary dictionary for the AP Stylebook.

Automated checkers aren’t new for AP — it introduced its StyleGuard in 2011, a plugin that checks writing done in Microsoft Word. Lingofy works for people writing directly into a CMS they access via a web browser. Users can add stylebook entries, and its dictionaries “improve over time,” the AP says. “The longer you use Lingofy, the more the system can learn about your unique writing style and the better the software gets at spotting errors and suggesting corrections.”...MORE