- inshorts incorporates AI-backed algorithmic summarization on its app which will help in summarizing long form news articles
- With the development of this AI feature, the app will be able to summarize more than 100K articles per month
- As of now, the feature will generate articles in English only and plans to expand to vernacular languages in the future
New Delhi : News aggregator and discovery platform inshorts, which provides news in 60 words, has developed ‘Rapid60’, an AI-backed algorithm which can automatically summarize a full length news article to 60 words. Launched in 2013, Delhi-based inshorts is one of India’s highest-rated news applications with more than 10 million downloads both on Android and IOS.
Parsing of data and content summarization remains one of the grand challenges of AI and machine learning, with a huge commercial potential. Together with the vast amount of training data available on its platform and the new feature, inshorts is another step closer to achieving the goal of creating a fully automated AI system which can convert a full length news article to a crisp, coherent 60 word short.
The training set of data for ‘Rapid60’ is the database of more than half a million articles which editors at inshorts have summarized in 60 words over the course of the last 5 years. The algorithm will also help to scale up the number of articles published per month on the platform from 10,000 to 1 lakh, therefore catering to the long tail of users.
Speaking about this new feature launch, Azhar Iqubal, Co-founder and CEO, inshorts , said, “In a bid to disrupt the content space, inshorts pioneered the short form content format in the country, and constantly focuses on strengthening content aggregation and creation for our readers.”
He added, “With the development of our AI backed algorithm, we will be able to attain greater operational efficiency by achieving 10x number of articles. We are hopeful that in the long run with this technology; we will be able to create new benchmarks in the ecosystem.”
Anunay Arunav, Co-founder and CTO, inshorts, said, “Incorporating AI into an industry like content creation which depends greatly on human intervention was quite a challenging task at hand. Before finalising, we had to run a lot of pilots in order to achieve a certain level of accuracy. With the existing solution, we are sure that we have been able to remove inefficiencies from the system thereby, helping create a fast-paced news summarization platform for the industry.”
Given an input article, the algorithm ‘Rapid60’ will generate shorts of 60 words, along with the headline and the card image automatically. This has been achieved over time by providing a training set of data (which includes a set of original articles and the corresponding 60 word shorts written manually by inshorts editors in past) to the program so that the program ‘learns’ how to summarize. One of the advantages inshorts has it that it has the largest set of training data in the world for the AI to learn to summarize an article into 60 words. As stated above, inshorts currently has more than half a million articles in its kitty.
inshorts recently became operationally profitable. Hitting a net revenue run rate of Rs. 25 crore in 2017, as compared to Rs. 3 crore in 2016, the company is targeting a net revenue rate of Rs. 100 crore in FY2018, with revenue coming in through branded partnerships and sponsored content.
About inshorts : inshorts news app, with more than 10 million downloads on Android and iOS. The app curates the most significant news items of the day, across categories like national, world, politics, business, sports, technology and entertainment, in just 60 words with a link to read the stories that interest them, in detail. This enterprise was set up by a team of IITians, Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Arunav of IIT Delhi and Deepit Purkayastha of IIT Kharagpur in 2013. Their entrepreneurial journey began from TLabs incubator in 2013 which was followed by a seed round from Times Internet and a group of angel investors including the founders of Flipkart. In 2015, inshorts raised a Series A round from Tiger Global and Rebright Partners, landing its Series B within 4 months, from Tiger Global.
