Yahoo’s News app has undergone a major transformation, leveraging the codebase of the acclaimed, albeit short-lived,app Artifact. This revamp injects a powerful dose of artificial intelligence, aiming to deliver a highly personalized news experience tailored to your specific interests.
Artifact, a news reader app led by Instagram’s co-founders, utilized AI algorithms to analyze user behavior and serve up personalized content. While it ultimately didn’t achieve the desired growth, its technology found a new home at Yahoo. In April, Yahoo acquired Artifact with the intent of enhancing its news app’s personalization capabilities.
The revamped Yahoo News app is now available for free on iOS and Android, accessible with or without a Yahoo account. This AI-driven update comes on the heels of similar enhancements to Yahoo Mail, further solidifying Yahoo’s commitment to embracing AI technology.
The app’s standout feature is its ability to generate AI-powered summaries of news articles, providing users with “Key Takeaways” that distill complex stories into concise summaries. While this feature is currently limited to a select group of desktop users, Yahoo aims to expand it across all platforms in the future.
The app’s algorithmic magic lies in its ability to curate personalized news feeds based on your interests. Upon launching the app, you’re prompted to select at least five topics you’re passionate about, ranging from politics and science to gaming and climate change. From there, a combination of AI algorithms and human editorial input shapes your news feed,ensuring you’re presented with the most relevant and engaging stories.
While AI plays a crucial role in personalizing your news experience, Yahoo emphasizes that human editors are still involved in the curation process. This ensures a balance between algorithmic recommendations and editorial judgment,preventing users from getting trapped in echo chambers.
Yahoo News also addresses the issue of clickbait headlines. Users can flag headlines that appear to be clickbait, and if enough people report them, the app will replace them with clearer, more informative rewrites generated by AI and fine-tuned by human editors.
Additionally, the app incorporates gamification elements to encourage engagement. As you read more articles, you’ll unlock badges and titles, such as “Learner” or “Sage,” based on your reading activity. This adds a fun and competitive aspect to staying informed.
Yahoo sees this revamp as just the beginning. The integration of Artifact’s technology opens up possibilities for future features, including using reading badges to grant users more authority within the broader Yahoo community.
While some features from the original Artifact, like AI voices reading articles aloud, haven’t yet made their way into the new Yahoo News app, the company assures us that more exciting updates are on the horizon.
