When you're watching the Olympics instead of say, the Washington Post, spare a thought for how the Washington Post is watching the Olympics.
The newspaper owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has outlined how it is using an algorithm to report on the Rio Olympics and plans to do during the upcoming US presidential election.
AI technology being used for posts and social media includes WaPo's inhouse-developed Heliograf system which automatically generates short multi-sentence updates. Olympics headlines and results are currently appearing in its live blog, on Twitter at @WPOlympicsbot, on Alexa-enabled devices and its Messenger bot.
Director of strategic initiatives Jeremy Gilbert says automated storytelling has the potential to transform the publisher's coverage: "More stories, powered by data and machine learning, will lead to a dramatically more personal and customised news experience," he says in a post by the newspaper.
"The Olympics are the perfect way to prove the potential of this technology. In 2014, the sports staff spent countless hours manually publishing event results. Heliograf will free up Post reporters and editors to add analysis, colour from the scene and real insight to stories in ways only they can."
He says Heliograf will continue to be developed to enhance storytelling for large-scale, data-driven coverage of major news events, and will also be able to process a combination of different data sources such as crime and real estate numbers, and customise stories "depending on individual user actions", and help look for anomalies in data to alert journalists to a potential story.
Engineering director of data science Sam Han says the Heliograf launch is a natural next step for The Post's use of machine learning: "The next challenge is to broaden the subjects covered, deepen the kind of analysis possible and identify potential stories for our newsroom."
During the Olympics, Heliograf's role includes short updates, an events schedule, medal results and tables alerts ahead of medal events. Readers can ask Alexa for updates.