The ability to extract insights from articles efficiently is a valuable skill for researchers, consultants, marketers, journalists, students, and countless others. In fact, Google gets 8.5 billion searches per day (although the number is incredible). That shows how search engines are woven into our professional and private lives. The internet would be far less valuable to us without them.
And yet, we have all been there - spending hours, even days, scouring the internet for answers to our questions, only to come up empty-handed or with incomplete information. Whether you are searching for academic journals, industry reports, news articles, or social media insights, we are not always successful.
The worst part is that this process can be time-consuming and frustrating. When you are on a tight deadline or working on a high-stakes project, the last thing you want to do is spend precious minutes and hours scrolling through Google results, hoping to stumble upon something useful.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard solve part of this problem, by delivering instant insights without having to trawl through the Internet. The fact that many of these models do not have real-time access to the Internet, however, do not make them a replacement for search engines at the moment. Another downside can be that the source of the answers cannot be checked, making if difficult to assess the reliability of answers.
Imagine having a tool that would close this gap between search engines and chatbots, how would it be of value to knowledge workers and professionals?
Insight Extraction from Articles with an Efficient Research Assistance Tool
A tool that combines the strengths of search engines and chatbots would use machine learning algorithms to provide accurate and relevant results more quickly and efficiently. When you are working on a project and need to know the latest developments in a particular field, such a research assistance tool can quickly scan the internet and provide you with relevant articles, reports, or research papers that have been published in the past few days or weeks. It could then read these documents for you and efficiently extract relevant answers to your questions.
This saves you many hours and in some cases days of time that would otherwise be spent sifting through pages of search results or trying to track down the latest information through manual searches. Additionally, by automating routine research tasks, these tools can free up our time to focus on higher-level thinking and problem-solving, enabling us to tackle complex challenges and develop cutting-edge solutions.
Foster Cross-Disciplinary Thinking
By finding documents and reading them to answer your questions, such a tool could help users access insights from diverse sources and disciplines, fostering cross-disciplinary thinking. This helps in generating innovative ideas and solutions by combining knowledge from different fields.
Cross-pollination of ideas often leads to creative breakthroughs as users connect seemingly unrelated concepts.
Conserve Your Mental Energy
Such a tool also helps manage information overload by presenting only the most relevant insights. This reduces cognitive load, allowing users to focus their mental energy on creative thinking rather than information processing. Creative endeavours often benefit from a clear mind, and the tool supports this by streamlining the information retrieval process.
Better Creative Collaboration
Within teams of people, a tool that finds relevant documents for you and reads them to answer your questions, can also boost creativity by providing a shared platform for accessing and discussing extracted insights. Teams can collaborate more effectively, leveraging collective intelligence to generate creative solutions and innovations. The ease of accessing relevant insights encourages a culture of curiosity and a thirst for knowledge within organisations. It can stimulate users to explore new ideas, seek out information, and engage in continuous learning when they have a tool that supports and encourages such behaviour.
Conclusion
A tool that reads relevant documents on the internet and extracts the insights from them that actually answer your question can be a powerful help for learning and creativity. It can support knowledge workers — such as researchers, consultants, marketers, business analysts, policy advisors, academics, students and others — in saving time and improving decision-making. Its applications in customer service, market research, and beyond are vast, and its impact on strategic objectives could be substantial.
