I can’t wait to welcome our robot journalist colleagues into the newsroom (or server room).

Newsrooms already rely on machine intelligence/processing, and increasingly so. We use machines to help us predict the next big story, to inform how we should manage a homepage, and even to write basic earnings stories and other data-driven reporting.

Yes, the robots are coming. And I see a role for them in quality assurance and accuracy. Below are five ways they can help.

The Washington Post’s Truth Teller prototype showcases one way we may be able to move towards real-time, automated fact-checking. This is an early experiment. But the declining ranks of quality control professionals such as fact-checkers and copy editors means[*] we need new, innovative and scalable ways to manage quality. (Not that I’m calling for the extinction of copy editors and fact-checkers!)