Automated Insights, the Durham-based company automating many writing tasks such as earnings reports for investor AP and fantasy sports reports for Yahoo, is launching a public beta of its Wordsmith platform.

Acquired by $14 billion firm Vista Equity Partners and its portfolio company STATS, a sports data analysis company, Automated Insights raised a $5.5 million Series B from investors including AP, Samsung and Steve Case last year.

Wordsmith is the company’s natural language generation platform, which turns data on earnings reports, personal fitness, and sports, among other topics, into narrative stories. AP has said it produces 3,000 articles a quarter on earnings reports using Wordsmith and plans to kick up its work with the company.

One billion pieces of content created

Last year, Wordsmith generated over one billion pieces of content with a team of just 50 employees, the company says.

To those of us in the content creation business, automating the creation of data driven news stories is both a bit worrisome (will it eliminate jobs?) and at the same time could free us from number crunching to do more creative work. Personally, we’re looking forward to giving Wordsmith a try.

Introducing the public Wordsmith beta, Robbie Allen, founder and CEO of the company, wrote, “Today we launch the public beta of our Wordsmith platform. Wordsmith is a new way to write and develop content using data.

“The process is part writing text and part writing logic, with data as the glue that ties everything together. Instead of writing a single story at a time, you create a story structure that can generate an unlimited number of articles. Wordsmith updates the writing process for the era of Big Data–and helps customers boost the return on their data investment.”

He adds, “If a 50-person company can create more than a billion stories, what if anyone who wants to communicate insights around their data had access to the technology? I resisted opening up the platform earlier because it’s very difficult to create a new data-driven writing interface that is intuitive for business users. But if it was easy, someone else would already be doing it.”

Wordsmith allows the creation of personalized content, Allen says. “Instead of writing one story and hoping a million people read it, Wordsmith can create a million stories targeted at each individual user and their preferences. It’s a story that is totally unique to each user because it is powered by their data,” he writes.

Allen also notes that producing content using Wordsmith is “An order of magnitude less than any other option.”

You can see examples on the company web site here: http://automatedinsights.com/examples/

Allen’s introduction to Wordsmith for the public: http://tinyurl.com/qfzsno3