The past few years have seen the news section of the app world hit a bit of a creative roadblock. After a beginning marked by insanely innovative apps like Flipboard and Pulse, news apps had subsided to a collection of apps of official news publications and channels or sites, apps like Shorts that delivered the news in compressed versions, or yet other apps that were basically like a skin placed over an RSS feed.
Artifact: clean interface with some personalization options
In this scenario, Artifact was like a breath of fresh air. You downloaded the app, chose the fields you wanted to follow, and then you got news from a selection of sources. The interface was clean, with even the ads not being too much of a pain – and you had a reader mode to clean matters further up. The neat touch to the app was the way in which it figured out what you were reading and tailored a selection of stories for you based on that. So for instance, I used to read a lot of book reviews and football reports, so after a while, Artifact started showing me more book and football-related information in the ‘For You’ section of the app. The app also gave you information on your reading habits, telling you about what kind of stories you had been reading. You could also leave comments on a story in the app and view comments made by others. The interface was clean on the primary screens (clicking on them led to a Website version opening in the app) and never seemed to overwhelm one like Flipboard did. Neither was one subjected to the sort of news deluge that Google and Microsoft’s news services are prone to serve up – just too much at one go. Things always seemed to be tailored just to suit your needs. Artifact was a nice, clean news app with some very good smarts and social media touches, and it got better as you used it, as it would figure out what you liked or did not seem to like and tweaked what it showed you accordingly.
Artifact: AI Summaries make it supreme!
What, however, has yanked it to the next level and right to the top of the list of our favorite news apps is a new Summarize option that appears with every story in the app and is AI-driven. On the surface, this seems pretty routine – hit the ‘Summarize’ option (we will show you how later in this story), and the app will present a shortened form of the story in a few bullet points by default.
Handy, you would say, but hardly revolutionary. What makes this special is the fact that you can summarize in different formats, And not your routine ones either. Just head to the options in the Summary box and check the other options. At the time of writing, you could choose from these options – Explain Like I’m Five, Emoji, Poem. and Gen Z, apart from the default ‘normal’-ish summary option. We picked up an option of each summary from Vox’s story “What is Bluesky, and why is everyone on Twitter talking about it?” and the results were quite spectacular – the Poem option actually rhymed, and we loved the emoji usage in the Emoji version! To be fair, the other summary options do not always work – there have been times when we have been greeted with literally nothing when we have tried different Summarize options, but most of the time, they do work. And when they work, they add a whole new dimension to the news. One that is succinct, smart, and, well, a lot of fun. We have no idea when we last used the f-word (we mean ‘fun’) with a news app. We almost always ended up wanting to read more summaries because they were all so delightfully different – there was a lot of “let’s see how it turns this into verse” and “let’s see how it dumbs it down for a five-year-old” and of course, most often, “let’s see which emojis are used then!” What is interesting, however, is that even with all this, the summaries seldom tampered with the essential meaning of a story (although you do get a warning that the summary has been written by AI and may contain mistakes).
As a result, we actually had a very good idea of the story because we had read its summary a few times. It is hands-down the most innovative feature we have seen on a news app – and an innovative feature that actually adds value instead of just being a digital bell and whistle. This is the reason why we think everyone out there needs to download a copy of Artifact. It is free, available for both iOS and Android and is not a cluttered read at all. Best of all, it provides us with one of the most useful AI deployments we have seen in a mainstream app – it puts a delightful spin on news summaries. We just hope more versions are added to the Summarize section! Download Artifact for iPhone Download Artifact for Android
How to view AI summaries on Artifact
On iOS:
Open the app and open a story. In the top right corner, you will see an option titled ‘Aa.’ Tap on it. The first option here will be Summarize. Tap on it. A Summary will now appear in a box. In the top right corner of the Summary box will be three dots. Tap on these. You will now see the options of the different kinds of Summaries the app can give you. Choose the one you wish. Tap Aa and choose to Summarize to make the Summary disappear.
On Android:
Same initial routine. Open the app and open a story. In the top right corner of the story, you will see a gear wheel similar to the one used for Settings. Tap on it. Tapping on the wheel will reveal a set of options, the last of which is Summarize. Tap on it. This will open a Summary box. To see more Summary options, tap on the three-button icon in the top right corner of the Summary box, and tap the option you want. Interestingly, the Android version of the app has the option to copy the summary, which the iOS version lacks at the time of writing. Tap the gear wheel icon and select Summarize to make the Summary box disappear.
