Automated Content Creation Using Natural Language Generation

Efficiency is key for companies that want remain fit and competitive. More and more, the intelligent automation of tasks is playing an important role in helping companies improve efficiency for a measurable competitive advantage. And here, e-Spirit is at the leading edge. We’ve been to help our customers achieve faster time to market and improved revenues for some time now, and are continuously focused on expanding our Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with ever-new AI-powered capabilities.

• Launched in 2017, FirstSpirit’s Intelligent Content Engine uses AI to deliver personalized customer experiences across multiple touchpoints and channels wherever customers may be. The Intelligent Content Engine does in split seconds what a team of marketers could previously do only at a snail's pace.
• In April 2018, we introduced AI-based Predictive Targeting which analyzes and optimizes the performance of content variations in real time across every channel giving marketers predictions about the success of possible that will help them better target very specific audiences at every step of their digital journey. One click is enough to activate optimization suggestions across channels and campaigns.

And we’re always looking for outstanding solutions in the market that can be used in a complementary way to the FirstSpirit DXP and bring added value to our customers. The ability to easily integrate FirstSpirit with the best systems and solutions on the market has always been the core of our DNA at e-Spirit. We recently partnered with one such company--Retresco--which offers market-leading solutions in the field of Natural Language Processing.

“Customers are looking increasingly for that help them reach new economies of scale. AI is quickly becoming a great enabler in this age where digital content is expanding at an unprecedented rate,” said Alexander Siebert, Founder and CEO for Retresco. “The strategic partnership between the companies will help e-Spirit customers increase productivity and time to market.”

Founded in 2008, Retresco has quickly become an expert in innovative semantic solutions, including in the field of automatic text generation also known as Natural Language Generation.

Retresco's text engine is used to automatically generate text -- in the form of e-commerce product descriptions, sports reports, financial reports, promotional text, SEO-relevant descriptions, job descriptions, etc -- at scale. According to studies, the text is virtually indistinguishable from human generated text. Here is an example of an NLG-generated product description:

Hard to distinguish it from human generated text, right?

What makes NLG interesting for our customers, however, is not simply creating one product description but the possibility of automatically generating as many as possible with human-like accuracy, in multiple languages, and in a short period of time for economies of scale. NLG can alleviate the content pressures marketers face while helping them generate even more individual content, and personalized for more channels!

The trick is leveraging an untapped asset that companies already have: metadata. NLG automatically creates text using structured data. In this way, product description text, for example, can be created for ten different products, or 10,000. Creating text at scale in milliseconds is what makes NLG is unbeatable.

The power of NLG lies in its "understanding" of grammatical structures. NLG is capable of intelligently merging content building blocks and metadata for error-free text production and human-like wording. A self-service interface allows editors to enhance tonality, control vocabulary, generate text arbitrarily using rules, and view content quality metrics -- in any language.

The Retresco text engine seamlessly integrates with the FirstSpirit DXP. This offers the following advantages in contrast to a stand-alone solution:

• NLG is seamlessly integrated into your editorial processes.
• Text can be generated directly from the FirstSpirit interface.
• FirstSpirit ensures NLG-generated text is personalized for increased customer engagement and brand loyalty.

Here NLG has no limits. If you have highly repetitive text or reports that need to be written, NLG is for you. All you need is neatly organized structured data and you’re off and running. Here are a few practical NLG applications:

• Digital Commerce: NLG is perfect for e-commerce marketers needing to create thousands of product descriptions for entire product catalogs.
• Finance & Insurance: News reports on stock market results can easily be generated by AI-driven NLG software.
• Human Resources: You can not only automate the creation of job descriptions, but also their publication to any channel such as your own website or third-party job website.
• Travel & Tourism: NLG can automate descriptions about locations, hotels, resorts, their grounds and rooms, as well as bars and restaurants – even events.
• Brick & Mortar: NLG can easily customize store landing pages with data such as local hours, opening hours, and more.
• Publishing: NLG can create thousands of news stories for a particular topic allowing publishers to create articles more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than human journalists.
• SEO: NLG can help tag images for SEO purposes, an undeniably manual task. In this way, it abstracts information from pictures, combines that information with product descriptions, and creates new text to drive better search results.

The central challenge facing all companies today is that they need much more content than they can produce in-house. NLG can contribute significantly. As a powerful new partner, the solution has immediate benefits not only for marketing, but also for HR, corporate communications, sales, service, production ... yes, basically any business that wants to create a lot of new, personalized content in an automated way. The copy can be variable in length, tonality and composition. It can easily added to any website or channel, and be personalized to customers along the customer journey. Benefits include:

Better Digital Experiences - at scale:

• End-users and customers benefit from high-quality texts that no human author could create ad-hoc or cost-efficiently
• Better search engine visibility leading to increase in organic SE traffic
• Individual and personalized content for increased customer engagement and brand loyalty

Cost savings and more efficient operations:

• Content authors are relieved from repetitive routine tasks and can focus on their non-AI-skills:
• Having more time for exploration, creativity and strategy
• NLG helps marketers to increase content output without additional resources
• NLG can minimize translation costs as multiple output languages can be generated simultaneously

Increased content quality:

• NLG ensures grammar, spelling and structure are 100% reliable without the need for review & approval
• NLG supports the use of a corporate wording, unified terms, product names, etc.
• The NLG engine ensures that a coherent and company-specific tonality is used
• But the real added value is that marketers are relieved of routine, time consuming tasks allowing time to address more strategic challenges such as telling stories that compel customers to action, and personalizing content for a digital experience edge.