While this podcast has often touched on the topic of AI – it would be hard not to – rarely have we got so far into the nuts and bolts of how it works and what it can do. That’s because Neil Burnett and his team at Arria NLG are doing some incredible work in natural language generation, or the process of transforming data into human-readable text and valuable insight.

You may have heard of NLP, a catch-all term that covers speech recognition, machine translation, sentiment analysis and more. NLG is a subset of the field, which aims produce fluent and meaningful text that conveys the relevant information from the data source. Neil tells us how it works in practice, describes some examples of Arria’s work and talks through the ethical issues, privacy concerns and potential limitations.

Of course, we also hear about Neil’s own career journey, from his uni days to director level, and get to know a little bit more about this personal interests and life outside work. All in all, it’s a great listen: enjoy!