Pulse just got better! Our latest release of Pulse, developed for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) by BSL, leverages cutting-edge Azure AI technology, introducing new AI-based features such as translation, summarisation, and sentiment analysis. We’ve also redesigned the user interface for an improved user experience and added “Personal Alerts”.
About Pulse
Pulse is a business news aggregation platform that imports around 60,000 news articles daily from commercial sources, websites and RSS feeds. Pulse makes all this data easily accessible by converting it into a standardised format, creating a unified hub for real-time insights into business news. It eliminates the need for tedious searches across multiple third-party platforms and portals. Pulse manages over 7,000 sources, distributing around 1,500 news alerts to nearly 30,000 subscribers. Pulse streamlines information gathering for PwC consultants, reducing reliance on manual methods and dramatically improving efficiency.
After a six-month development project, we are preparing to release a new version of Pulse, including several groundbreaking features powered by embedded AI.
AI summaries
PwC employees can easily keep track of the latest developments in their areas of interest through the automated notifications (so-called “News Alerts”) delivered by Pulse. The latest version of Pulse has made this process even more straightforward, thanks to the use of embedded AI to translate the source material from over 100 different languages and automatically create an English language summary of each alert’s content. This “abstractive summary” is prominently displayed in the interface (see Figures 1 and 2) and News Alert emails (Figure 3), making the summaries instantly accessible to users.
Figure 1: Summaries prominently displayed on the Homepage.
Glancing at the summaries now gives PwC employees a good idea of what the alerts contain, without reading dozens of individual articles or headlines.
Figure 2: Summary on the News Alert page
Figure 3: Email summary.
Sentiment analysis
You may have noticed that we now display the “sentiment” for each News Alert, i.e., whether the latest news is positive or negative.
We utilise embedded AI to determine the sentiment of every article in a News Alert and calculate the average for the entire alert. We then compare this with past values. By maintaining a record of the sentiment history, we can display the percentage difference (change in sentiment) between the current and earlier alerts. This information lets users quickly determine whether an alert’s sentiment has changed abruptly (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Sentiment of an alert.
For users interested in more details, we can display a chart showing how the sentiment score has changed over time. This is an effective way to visually represent the data and help users make informed decisions.
Users can also find more information about how we’ve derived the sentiment score, identifying individual words within the text linked to sentiment. This additional information helps PwC’s users to understand why and how the sentiment may have changed.
Figure 5. The history and derivation of a sentiment score.
Personal Alerts
As described earlier, News Alerts are a crucial element of Pulse. Until recently, these alerts have been set up and managed by Information Specialists at PwC. These specialists select relevant topics and associated sources based on their knowledge and experience and create queries that return relevant and appropriate articles. If Pulse users are interested in a subject for which no alert is available, they can request an alert from the specialists. However, this can be a time-consuming process.
Figure 6. Saving a Personal Alert.
When users perform a search on Pulse directly from the front end, they now have the option to save their search as a “Personal Alert” (Figure 6). These new Alerts take advantage of one of Pulse’s key features: real-time data. Furthermore, this change reduces the workload on Information Specialists.
End users automatically receive an email when matching content is added to Pulse, just like the alerts managed by Information Specialists.
Custom software and embedded AI for your organisation
While we developed Pulse originally for PwC in the Netherlands, Pulse is now a global resource within PwC. Slashing search time by 95% and reducing research costs, Pulse has proven its worth. It is an example of how BSL operates – working with clients to define their requirements, then building, delivering and supporting a custom solution to meet their needs. Furthermore, BSL is available to work on new features as the demands change or new technologies arrive.
Call us to discuss your company’s needs for a custom solution. We offer a fixed price/fixed date offer, ensuring an efficient and personalised solution that fits within your budget and timeline.
