I used to work as a web editor at a daily newspaper. One of my daily responsibilities was to write and post short blurbs about lottery results and beach surf conditions. They both were extremely formulaic, so I wrote push-button scripts that would fetch the data, parse it, and generate stories. Saved me time, which I used to do other, more important things.<p>Some people have said, "Why not just display the raw data?"<p>Well, to save you the trouble of having to analyze the data.<p>For instance, suppose I've written a Powerball results script that lists the winning numbers, along with which states had winners.<p>If I'm just spitting out the raw data, then people might miss the fact that one of the winners was from our state -- whereas if I'm generating a story, I'm going to make that the lede.<p>Similarly, the magic of a company like Narrative Science and its Quill service is not in taking a ton of data and filling in a bunch of blanks with the values, Mad Libs style. It's in analyzing the data and figuring out what the most important parts are, and constructing a story around those findings.<p>In other words, it's not hard for a bot to write, "The Tigers played the Wolves yesterday. The Tigers won 1-0. The Tigers' John Johnson scored a home run."<p>It's more difficult to write, "The Tigers' Tom Thompson pitched the first no-hitter of his career yesterday in a 1-0 game against the Wolves. Remarkably, the Wolves' pitcher, Dobbie Dobson, was moments away from forcing the game into extra innings with his own no-hitter, when, in the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes on the board, the Tigers' John Johnson hit a home run."<p>(I'm not a baseball writer, so I'm probably bungling it, but you get the point.)