In our toolkit: BBC News BotBuilder — In the past six months BBC News has piloted a series of in-article chatbots to help casual news readers catch up on long-running news stories. From the general election to the Royal Wedding, the bots have answered questions about the biggest stories of the year. The bots have proved popular…

What does a typical day in BBC News Labs look like? — We often describe News Labs as the BBC’s “innovation incubator”. …

How can news organisations prepare themselves for a conversational future? — Big news organisations are still geared towards the one-way interaction models of broadcast and print media. But they are increasingly experimenting with new formats to engage with viewers and readers more directly. News Labs and BBC R&D have organised our own event at South by Southwest to explore how news…

This piece was co-written by BBC News Labs’ AI Researcher Fionntán O’Donnell and Software Engineer Remi Oduyemi. It’s the second in a series exploring facial recognition. For more background on how facial recognition works, check out A Brief Guide to BBC R&D’s Video Face Recognition. Part of our jobs in…

We’re looking for software engineers to work on a pan-European media monitoring project. — Are you creative, flexible and enthusiastic about language technology? We’re hiring senior software engineers to explore how the cutting-edge language technologies generated by our research partners can be used to power the BBC’s News production workflows and tooling. About the role: Scalable Understanding of Multilingual MediA, or Summa, marries pioneering technology from research…

How can we help less engaged audiences understand big news stories? — The bigger a news story, the harder it gets for the casual reader to understand recent developments. This is particularly a problem for readers that tend to be less engaged with the news. For example, our research shows younger readers may know that a story is important, but often don’t…

By Labber Rachel Blimey, we’ve won an award, the 2017 Online Media Award for ‘Technical Innovation’. We’re obviously a little bit proud when Labs’ innovation is publicly recognised, but in some ways we were also a little surprised. To be honest, we have moved on to other projects, and the…

BBC News Labs has six open positions for flexible and imaginative developers with an enthusiasm for media. We’re growing our team to support BBC World Service as it undergoes its biggest expansion since the 1940s, launching 11 new language services and committing to a global audience of 500 million weekly…