The Associated Press is partnering with Arkadium to use InHabit, an interactive content tool launched last year.
Arkadium’s goal for InHabit is to automatically add interactive polls, quizzes and games into relevant stories, hopefully making those stories more engaging in the process. The technology was initially designed for sports content, so the AP is starting its integration on its pro football, college football and college basketball sites.
In fact, the integration is already live, as you can see in this football story.
The interactive content — what Arkadium calls “factives” — will reach beyond AP-owned properties, because the sites also repurposed and distributed by AP publishers with their own branding. And the company says it’s exploring other ways to incorporate factives into the content that it syndicates with partners.
Fernando Ferre, the AP’s vice president of business development, said he found the partnership appealing because of its “scalability,” with InHabit allowing the AP to “easily integrate this automatically generated content and make it relevant to the article.” He also noted that the AP has been experimenting with using artificial intelligence to write earnings reports: “We’ve carved out an interesting sort of lead position in that area.”
Arkadium Jessica Rovello said added that team is working with the AP to build templates for the kinds of factives that will fit with AP content.
“From there, we actually let the system take over,” Rovello said. “If the system determines that there is a factive that’s a good match for this story, it will show up. If there’s no match, nothing will show up. The editor doesn’t need to be policing this on a day-to-day basis.”
