Particle, an AI newsreader start-up founded by former Twitter engineers, has launched an AI news app designed to assist publishers, TechCrunch reported.
The app is backed by $4.4m in seed funding and a $10.9m Series A financing led by Lightspeed.
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Founded last year by Sara Beykpour, former senior director of product management at Twitter, Particle aims to enhance news understanding through AI.
The app goes further than simply summarising stories into bullet points, providing additional features that allow users to approach news in varied ways.
Particle aims to compensate publishers and drive traffic back to news sites by linking sources beneath AI summaries.
Initial partners of the app are said to include Reuters, AFP and Fortune.
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By GlobalDataThe app’s article section features large tap targets, facilitating easy navigation to publishers’ sites.
It also displays journalists’ faces on bylines, allowing readers to explore more content or follow them.
Particle’s AI tools enable users to switch between modes like Explain Like I’m 5 for simplified stories or summaries focusing on the 5Ws.
Users can also access summaries in other languages or listen to audio versions.
The app highlights important quotes and reference links and also uses AI to present news from different perspectives and engage users with story-related questions.
The Opposite Sides tool breaks filter bubbles by offering diverse viewpoints.
An AI chatbot feature allows users to ask questions and receive instant answers about stories, with suggested questions included.
The news publication quoted Beykpour as saying: “We have a processing pipeline that takes related content and summarises it into bullet points, into a headline, sub-headline and does all the extractions.
“Then… we pull out quotes and links and all sorts of relevant information about [the story]. And we have our own algorithms to rank, so that the most important or relevant link is the one that you see first – or what we think is the most important or relevant quote is the one that you see first.”
The app also incorporates technologies such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic and Cohere, alongside traditional AI from Google.
