Trying to figure out the best way to curate your news diet these days can be, at best, difficult. Besides reading everything published by TechRadar, navigating and connecting news stories you want to follow up on can feel like a full-time job on its own. A new mobile app called Particle is employing AI to solve that problem. Particle’s iOS app relies on AI to sift through the news, looking beyond headlines and across multiple platforms to create more comprehensive reports on current events and real-time answers to questions about the news.
Particle offers customizable summaries of the news called Stories, claiming they are a more holistic way to explain what’s happening in the world. You can ask the app to simplify the news by telling it to “Explain Like I’m 5” or get the most concise, basic facts with the “5Ws” format of who, what, when, where, and why. If you want to see a range of opinions and views on a story, you can open the “Opposite Sides” summary for contrasting perspectives.
You can also ask for the summaries in audio form and in different languages. If just seeing summaries is too passive, Particle also has an AI chatbot to answer questions about stories and see what others have asked. The AI also adapts to your interests so you’re more likely to see stories on the topics you care about.
“We’re often scouring the news, looking for answers we might not even find. With Particle, you can get an instant answer to any question about the story. And because you can see other people’s questions, sometimes the answer you’re looking for is already there,” Particle wrote in a blog post. “We enable powerful and transparent control over which stories you see, and which you don’t. On Particle, you can tune your interests to the topics that matter the most to you. Your news feed will adapt to your interests, bringing you the most relevant stories without the noise.”
AI journalistic aid
AI’s foibles being what they are, Particle tries to avoid issues of incorrect facts and hallucinations with reviews by AI models and human oversight. The stories all include links to original sources as well; useful if you see something that comes off as unlikely. If the AI gets something wrong, you can flag it to have Particle fix the error.
Efficient news gathering is obviously appealing to busy people. Particle’s app can be as in-depth or straightforward as you want, which is another benefit to those who want to be more engaged in current events but who sometimes just want the basic facts and other times want more background than any single article might include. I’d rather rely on Particle than on the sometimes garbled or misunderstood takes seen on social media. If you want to keep up with the news without spending all day sorting through different sources, I’d give it a try after you finish your daily read-through of every word published here.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
