A colleague and I developed a chatbot that acts as a copy editing resource in USC Annenberg’s student newsroom. We launched Amy on Slack, which the newsroom was already using, in November 2017 after noticing that students already had so many tabs to open and documents to consult during their newsroom shifts. We wanted to find a more seamless (and fun!) way for them to be exposed to copy editing.

We started with a copy editing cheatsheet we had already developed for the students — just 11 simple style rules. Since then, we’ve expanded the bot to more than 100 entries, and it’s become a more holistic newsroom resource, as we incorporated our ethics policy and other journalism tips.

Beyond providing a copy editing resource, we use Amy to experiment with information dissemination via chat. I’ve written about Amy here and here.