Yahoo News app is getting a significant revamp that will bring several new artificial intelligence (AI) features to the news reporting and aggregation platform. The company highlighted that the new app’s AI capabilities come from the now-defunct AI news app Artifact. Yahoo acquired the platform in April 2024, and it has now integrated its architecture within its news app. The platform now offers a customisable feed, key takeaways of articles and top stories, tools for easy sharing, and the ability to mark headlines as clickbait to users.
Yahoo News App gets AI features
Artifact was created by Instagram Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2023 as an AI-powered news aggregation and recommendation platform. The duo attempted to integrate gamification and social media elements into the platform but had to shut shop just a year later due to its lack of popularity. However, Yahoo acquired the platform for an undisclosed amount. Now, the company has integrated Artifact to revamp its news app.
“The proprietary AI-powered personalisation technology and other features have been integral in the development of this differentiated mobile app that gives people opportunities to catch-up-quick or dive deeper, all while seeing more of what matters and is useful to them, all in one place,” Yahoo said in a press release.
With this revamp, the Yahoo News app gets an AI-powered personalised feed where users can select topics and publishers as per their preferences and the AI will show more of that content. Top Stories is another new feature that shows the day’s trending news topics across the planet. Soon, an AI-powered takeaways feature will also be released on each trending topic that will allow users to catch up to the major stories quickly.
The Key Takeaways feature in the app generates key points of a news article and displays them at the top to give users a fair idea of what the article is about. Apart from these, users will also have the ability to block certain keywords and share articles on third-party apps. Yahoo is also experimenting with gamification. It has added streaks and badges for those who read a certain number of articles per day, and continue to do so consistently.
Interested individuals can find the Yahoo News app on Android’s Google Play Store and the iOS App Store. However, currently, it is only available in certain countries. The app is not available in India.
