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Sentence Generator using some form of AI to recombine sentences

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questorfla:
This is something that i believe already exists if i knew what "name" to look for.  I will try to give a good description of what is needed and hope that someone has seen or heard of such a program.

(Please excuse my order of presentation.  I had to add things as they came to mind.  I can conceptualize the end result but explaining how I am getting there is not so easy)

The starting premise is this:  I need a way to assist a shift manager in writing short nightly reports for what was done each day on their shift.

Let's say I start with 200 different historical "event reports".  These are just short descriptions of what the person on duty that night wrote down to explain how their shift passed.
Each of them is similar but each was written from the viewpoint of whoever was on that shift that night.  To take this to an extreme example, lets say a shift manager at a restaurant has to write up the events of the final shift at closing every day.  Or any other job that would require a descriptive written statement about happenings during a given period of time.

After a few months or years if you read back over these events you can see that with very few changes, they are all extremely similar.  I would like to see if there is a way to use a computer program to create a generic "scripted report"" based on the ones written in the hundreds of previous reports.  The intent is to assist the person who is writing the new ones by providing a sort of guideline to work with.  Of course, there would always be may differences and it isn't meant to replace a real written report for that day.

But it would provide a framework of what COULD have happened and help the person on duty more clearly remember what really did happen on their shift.
 
I had thought about just pulling up random complete reports and providing one in a side-box to help jar the memory of the person on duty that night.  To give them a way to "think".  If they see what others said in the past, it will help them visualize what happened during their own shift that occurred at the same place doing the same job but was written up by another person maybe years in the past.  But i don't want to risk giving someone a "Play by Play" that they might be inclined to copy outright.

After writing these shift reports for every single day for a couple off years, eventually, anyone doing it will run out of ways to say things.  Simple Writers Block!   Seeing how another person viewed that particular shift from another point in time I am hoping would give them new ways of thinking about things.  Maybe see things from a different perspective.  This has become a major issue for this company and the shift managers dread that nightly report which should only take them 5 minutes to write if they could approach the task with some minor coaching in how to say the same things they wrote the day before and all the days before that.   Having a "Real Report" written by someone they probably never met but who had to deal with all the same responsibilities and be able to see how That Person wrote about those same events, i believe this would help build new insights and broaden the vocabularies of those who do it. 

Additionally, if i could find the right software.  One with enough AI components that could reconfigure the previous reports in such a way as to intelligently interchange some of the phrases and other statements, it would at the least create enough unusual errors to possibly cause some real creative thinking.

By the way, this is an "Actual Problem" that I am looking for an "Actual Creative Solution" to.  The people involved always eventually get to where they say they just cant think of anything "New" to say that they haven't already said a thousand times before.  My idea may be a total flop but i would be willing to take the time to enter a few hundred of these reports and see if maybe being able to see the way their predecessors saw things a year or two ago could be, if nothing else, a way to broaden their viewpoint and vocabulary.

This would all be done in text.  No "voice to text" capacity involved.  The reports are never more than a couple of short paragraphs and to be honest, YES, they ARE very boring .  There are only so many ways to say "Nothing eventful happened".  But there is always something that does happen no matter how small.  And Corporate requires them to write these things even if no one ever reads them.  I feel that by offering a view on how others saw things and how they wrote them up might be worth a try.

It would work like a "Daily Quote".  Only one "report template" would be presented each night.  I am hoping that this in itself would create enough of a "puzzle" for someone to try to see how the random report from years back or even better , a report that would be created by the system from combining several of those on file,  would make a stimulating challenge out of what is now a dreaded task.

If anyone has any ideas of how this could be accomplished i would appreciate the replies.

rjbull:
Are you saying the following?

1) Usually, nothing much happens
2) Corporate demand a report anyway
3) Corporate further demand said report be written as if the nothing much that barely happened was an exciting event worthy of poetic response
4) Corporate never read the reports

If so, I'd consider Corporate to be stuffed with supernumaries engaged in making work for other people, to justify their own existence.  A bit of culling is indicated.

However, if you must endure this silly situation, you might possibly get at least part way with mouser's Form Letter Machine:
The Form Letter Machine is a program that will help you to write letters and emails by mixing and matching from pre-written paragraphs.

It's useful for people who regularly need to send out emails which include different components in different circumstances. For example if you field technical support requests, or if you need to reply to various inquiries, etc.
--- End quote ---

Someone would have to write a multitude of templates in the first place, and I also wonder if FLM's variables are sufficiently sophisticated.  Besides, you seem to need something like FLM cross-bred with one of the Corporate Bullshit Generators you can find on the Web.

FLM's Help quotes only one similar program, a commercial one: Blitzdocs:
Blitzdocs is the fastest and most powerful document automation and document assembly software. It helps you quickly design and generate common and specialized documents and forms for a variety of purposes, including agreements, invoices, letters, etc.

Document assembly, at the most basic level, is the creation of new, complete documents from the combination of 1) new, and 2) existing information.

Reusing existing information is more efficient than retyping the information into the computer. Although document assembly may take on many forms, it is this basic concept that makes it so appealing to law firms.

Why do I need it? To save time and money by lowering the overhead of document production and its staffing.

--- End quote ---

questorfla:
Yes, this was a REAL post and I thank you for your info. 

I THOUGHT I had seen something somewhere on the site that would do something like this.  I am sure it was probably Mousers product.  Many thanks for sending me that link  to it.

And Yes, Corporate "IS" full of people who have WAYYY too much time on their hands and this is a good example of why everything is fast going to Heck in a Hand-basket!

Be that as it may, Yes, I DO have access to a nice treasure trove of "all the right things to say" that could be used to build a generic but general response for any given night only needing to change the name and dates in some places.

This will save a ton of time and probably prove the needless waste of making people go through this, much like those morning "meetings" before employees clock in where they are all given the "Rah Rah" treatment (on their own time).

I could give you other examples of but I know no one is really interested and i just thank you for taking the time to send me what you did.

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