Imagine you had a personal assistant that you can task with sorting out a pile of messy documents, or ploughing through a mountain of spreadsheets to find what you are looking for. Enter the Quartz AI Studio, a US-based project that helps journalists use machine learning to write better stories. The initiative, launched in November 2018 with the support of Knight Foundation, is spearheaded by John Keefe, Quartz's technical architect for bots and machine learning, who previously led the Quartz Bot Studio. "Many of our bots do include artificial intelligence, and specifically machine-learning, in their operations," he said. "But that's usually to help facilitate conversations -- understanding and interpreting natural language, for example. Or learning when is the best time of day to talk to someone. "But for the machine learning we think can help support reporters, the applications are far more specific.