Pakistan introduces first business robot journalist

KARACHI: Pakistan has introduced the first-ever business robot journalist, Dante, who writes and publishes a comprehensive report on stocks traded at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) within a few seconds after the market’s closure.
“The Pakistan Stock Exchange is closed at 3:30pm (from Monday to Thursday and at 4:30pm on Friday) and it gets the daily report published before it is 3:31pm,” said the award-winning tech startup, baseH Technologies, Founder and CEO Anisuddin Sheikh.
The Robot Journalist, also called Dante, had been writing the reports for the past few days, he said at a signing ceremony to get seed money from the Elahi Group of Companies for the project at the National Incubation Centre (NIC) at NED University on Saturday.
Simultaneously, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based content writing software develops a video on share trading and gets it uploaded at YouTube, Sheikh said.
The robot journalist is capable of doing sports and weather reporting as well. Later, it will be equipped to report on other sectors like health, education and culture. The financial sector, especially the securities brokerage houses and asset management firms, can also hire the robot to write comprehensive financial reports to seek guidance on taking investment and divestment decisions every morning.
“We have advanced talks with three big media houses in Pakistan for deployment of the AI technology,” the startup founder said.
“The report is free from human errors and unbiased,” he claimed. “Media houses may feed their editorial policies to the content-writing software before generating such reports.”
It could also help experts and analysts take better decisions and reduce their workload significantly, at securities brokerage houses, asset management companies and in other sectors in the financial industry, as they had to visit a number of websites and read all the newspapers to take their investment and divestment decisions before PSX began trading at 9:30am on working days, he said.
“TheRoboJournalist writes the report after taking into account the related fundamental analytics, technical information (like graphs and charts) and gauging prevailing sentiments. It also takes into account the development taking place on social media, irrespective of whether the development is true or not to gauge the sentiment,” he said.
The software would significantly improve the quality of work and efficiency at a reduced time and a nominal cost, operating at media and financial houses.
“It will cut the cost by 10 times and improve efficiency by 400 times,” said baseH co-founder and financial-sector expert Khurram Schehzad. “Around five to six financial companies are ready to deploy the software,” he said.
The Pakistani startup had raised seed funding and the initial value of baseH was estimated at over $4 million, he said. “This is the highest level of initial valuation in the artificial intelligence/tech space in Pakistan fetched by any company so far,” a statement read.
Federal IT Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, who was present at the signing ceremony, said digital transformation of all functions, companies, communities and economies was an inevitable consequence of the fourth industrial wave technologies.
“I foresee the $4-million tech company becoming a $400-million concern in the next five years,” Elahi Group of Companies CEO Danish Elahi said while talking to The Express Tribune.

Source : The Express Tribune