Yahoo Upgrades Its News and Mail Apps with AI Technology

Yahoo announced it is bringing new AI features to its news and mail platforms. Its reimagined news app leverages tech acquired when it purchased news aggregator Artifact this spring. Greater personalization and a more intuitive UI are among the upgrades, which include feed customization, summaries of articles and top stories and improved sharing tools. Yahoo says all of this will allow users to make its news aggregator feed a more individualized experience that improves with use. Artifact creators Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, who co-founded Instagram, announced plans in January to shutter the AI-powered news app.

Available for download on iOS and Android, “the new Yahoo News app brings an AI-powered personalized news feed for users based on their interests, while a feature called Key Takeaways can give a bullet summary of a news article when a reader is feeling TL;DR,” (too long; didn’t read), writes The Verge.

Yahoo News now spotlights the day’s trending news from around the world. “AI-powered takeaways will be featured at the top of  each of the top stories, giving readers the option to catch up more quickly on trending news of the moment,” Yahoo explains in an announcement. Yahoo News will continue to aggregate news from different sources, and AI summaries will automatically populate atop most articles within the app.

“You can block stories with undesired keywords as well as filter out certain publishers” based on your preferences. “And just like Artifact, Yahoo News also lets you flag content like clickbait-y headlines, then lets AI write something better,” The Verge reports.

TechCrunch, which is owned by Yahoo, says that “while the Yahoo News app is taking learnings from Artifact when it comes to offering AI features,” the AI summaries — which will also appear on the Yahoo News site on the web — are “not related to its acquisition of the well-liked AI news app that had been created by Instagram’s founders, but had shut down after failing to reach a wider audience.”

According to ZDNet, Yahoo Mail is also getting AI-powered features in what the company says is “one of the most significant updates to its desktop experience in nearly a decade,” with a cleaner design and AI organizational and summary tools.

“A new Priority inbox tab will populate the most important messages accompanied by AI-generated, one-line summaries of the emails,” writes ZDNet, adding that “Yahoo claims its email service is the first to offer this feature.”

No Comments Yet

You can be the first to comment!

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.