Today Yahoo is debuting a revamped version of its news app.
This new Yahoo News app, which is available as a free download now, is powered by the underlying code of the well-received yet short-lived app Artifact.
This AI push for the News app comes a few days after Yahoo introduced AI updates to its Mail app.
Yahoo is also adding generative AI summaries of news articles.
And behind the scenes, there’s a variety of AI algorithms pulling strings to show you what you want to see.
Today Yahoo is debuting a revamped version of its news app. This new Yahoo News app, which is available as a free download now, is powered by the underlying code of the well-received yet short-lived app Artifact. And of course, the new app is infused with AI capabilities to surface the news articles that might interest you most.
Artifact was a news reader app that launched in 2023 and was helmed by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It made heavy use of AI, employing algorithms to process user behavior and serve readers highly personalized content based on which news stories they engaged with. A little more than a year after it started, the Artifact team shut down the service after it became clear it wasn’t growing enough.
Though the app may have floundered, its resurrection was swift. In April, Yahoo announced it had bought Artifact with the goal of bringing Yahoo users “more content tailored to their interests.” Just a little more than two months later, that plan has emerged in the form of the revamped Yahoo News app.
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Yahoo News is gigantic. It’s the biggest news platform in the US, with more than 185 million monthly visitors. Now, Yahoo hopes to use the machine intelligence engine behind Artifact to revitalize its app by sharpening its powers of personalization, a move that could help Yahoo hop headfirst into the AI scrum.
The new Yahoo News app is free (though ad-supported), available on iOS and Android, and can be used with or without a Yahoo account. This AI push for the News app comes a few days after Yahoo introduced AI updates to its Mail app. Yahoo is also adding generative AI summaries of news articles. In the new app, users will see a prompt in some stories to generate “Key Takeaways.” After tapping the prompt, users will see a quick summary load after a second or two of computation. The AI summaries appear in the desktop version of Yahoo News too, but only for a small subset of users who are selected and then choose to opt in.
The recommendation features enabled by the Artifact-driven algorithms in the Yahoo News app are only mobile for now. They aren’t powering the desktop version of Yahoo News yet, but Yahoo says the goal is to eventually synchronize features across all platforms.
Kat Downs Mulder, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, says the update is a “complete top to bottom redesign of our Yahoo News app.” Even at first glance, the difference is immediately noticeable. The app looks slick and uncluttered, and it’s simple to navigate. And behind the scenes, there’s a variety of AI algorithms pulling strings to show you what you want to see. Some of these features are powered by proprietary technology, and some are powered by the AI bigwigs Yahoo has partnered with, like OpenAI.
