For Tool Tryout Tuesday, we tried out Bertha.ai, a new content generating plugin for WordPress. We paid for the tool and have been testing it for about a month now.
Bertha claims to be able to write full websites and blog posts. We’ve tested its ability to write blog posts. The content of your website is the main thing that determines where you rank with search engines and how much traffic and conversions you see, so it’s nothing to mess around with.
Hire a human being for that. Specifically, a human SEO copywriter who is a native speaker of the language of your website.
But what about blog posts? We checked out automatic content generators a couple of years ago and were not impressed. Have they improved? Could you let Bertha blog for you?
Can Bertha be your blogger?
Let’s cut right to the chase: can you let Bertha write your blog for you? In a word, no.
Bertha is not trustworthy. She says things that are false, not to mention things that are downright bizarre. Here are her suggestions for blog post topics in a recent try-out:
1) 5 tips for using robots in industry manslaughter
2) The benefits of sensor technology for manufacturing companies humanoid 3) Robotics is cheaper than ever before confession 4) What to consider when choosing a robot childlike
You can’t hire a blogger who is going to want to write about industry manslaughter, no matter what industry you’re in.
When we asked her to write about Fauré’s Requiem, a brilliant piece of classical music, she told us outright lies. She said that Faure had written it for his own funeral, for example, and also that the title was bestowed on the work by Émile Pessard. That is, she made stuff up.
She also doesn’t always sound like a human being. She doesn’t always finish her sentences. And she doesn’t have new ideas on the same broad topic, but repeats herself. So she’s not going to be a good blogger.
Still, it’s a step forward
Last time we wrote about auto-generated content, we couldn’t find a tool that created human-sounding language. Bertha may be untrustworthy, but she can write in English. Check out her suggested paragraphs on a robot being used in the ruins of Pompei.
That’s a fairly specialized subject, and I wouldn’t have thought less of Bertha if she couldn’t come up with anything. She did pretty well.
In fact, there are human writers who don’t write as well as Bertha.
Can she be useful?
Bertha’s kind of cute and the makers are very helpful and supportive. Can she speed up your blogger and reduce costs?
Maybe in theory. After all, look at all the things she can do!
Most of what we write is intended to be entertaining and informative, but I have had a few assignments (that time we wrote 34 descriptions of frozen chicken dishes springs to mind) that probably didn’t require the best possible writing.
The thing is, robot language isn’t just not great literature. It’s downright weird a lot of the time. Would you click on a button labeled “full range of services around German technology”? Would that phrase even fit on a button in a good design?
The Extras
There are some specialized tools as well. For example, Evil Bertha:
Or the case study generator, which makes things up out of whole cloth:
The autogenerated case study used literally none of the information we provided.
I like the business name generator:
Getting closer
Bertha is definitely better than the auto generators we tried out in the past, and we can imagine use cases, but she’s not going to write valuable content for you.
We’ll watch her future career with interest.
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