A news app is using AI to curate clarity over clickbait

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…