After the shutdown of the buzzy AI news app Artifact from Instagram’s founders, a latest app called Bulletin can be now turning to AI to assist remove clickbait and summarize the day’s news. Except on this case, users can customize news sources the app features, as you possibly can in every other RSS reader, as an alternative of counting on a curated choice of news, as Artifact did. The AI integration, meanwhile, helps to remove clickbait headlines out of your news-reading experience. Plus, with a click of a button, you’ll be able to access a summary of either the article and even all articles within the feed.
Bulletin was created by developer Shihab Mehboob, a prolific indie developer who recently sold his Mastodon client Mammoth to Mozilla. Notes Mehboob, the app works across Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and even Apple Vision Pro. (An Apple TV version can be coming shortly after launch.)
Image Credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
Getting began with the news app is easy because it comes with a default set of feeds for various categories of stories, including World News, Technology, Entertainment, Business, Sports, Fashion and more. Nonetheless, you’ll be able to customize this experience if you happen to select, by adding or removing feeds from the app’s settings to make it your personal.
As you browse the sections, you’ll be able to opt to enhance the titles of stories posts using AI — a feature designed to assist combat clickbait titles — in addition to tap on the “Smart Summary” choice to have a ChatGPT-style quick summary of the article’s most important points. Mehboob says he’s using OpenAI’s GPT to handle the AI components.
Image Credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
These options recall a few of Artifact’s best features, in that it also offered quite a lot of AI-powered news summaries, including those in a spread of styles, like “explain like I’m five,” or for fun, in Gen Z speak, or using only emojis, amongst others. Bulletin doesn’t go quite that far, though it does offer an “explain like I’m five” alternative to the default summary style, for those news stories which are more complex, perhaps. Helpfully, it could possibly translate summaries into your local language and offers a native “copy summary” button so you’ll be able to save or share the news in one other app.
Not all headlines profit from the “Improve Title” clickbait removal option, but in some cases, it could possibly be useful. For example, a Kotaku article titled “The Most Ambitious Space Game Ever Made Is Free This Weekend” is retitled to the more accurate and complete “No Man’s Sky offers free weekend trial with Omega update.”
Inside each news section, you too can get caught up quickly by tapping the AI button at the highest right of the screen, whose starlight-shaped icons resemble those utilized by Google’s Gemini. After tapping, the AI Smart Summary will pop up overlaid in your screen offering a bulleted list of the highest news from that section.
Image Credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
In Bulletin’s settings, you’ll be able to toggle off the news categories you don’t wish to browse, in addition to the person news sources the app includes by default. This also lets you customize the app’s For You feed, which offers articles from across all sections. But what makes the app handy for power users and heavy news consumers is that you may add every other website that gives an RSS feed to the app, too.
Image Credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
One quibble with this feature is that you may’t just add the web site URL as you’ll be able to in other RSS readers like Feedly, with a view to have the app auto-discover the associated RSS feed. As a substitute, you’ll have to copy and paste the whole RSS feed’s URL into the box provided. This might present a challenge because many web sites today not hassle featuring the orange RSS icon that directs you to their feed, as RSS has fallen out of fashion. As a substitute, you frequently must discover the RSS feed on your personal using a browser plug-in or an RSS reader that may determine the right feed for you.
A clever feature is the choice to make use of iOS’s Live Activities to place a news ticker in your Lock Screen (but you’ll be able to turn this off, if desired.)
Further down the road, Mehboob desires to add support for following social network updates within the app, much like Tapestry, the brand new app in development from The Iconfactory, which mixes RSS feeds, news alerts and social networks into one interface. Bulletin’s developer tells TechCrunch that Mastodon and Bluesky would “most definitely” be his first candidates once he heads on this direction, but didn’t share a timeframe.
Bulletin is free to make use of however the AI features aren’t. The anti-clickbait option and the flexibility to view unlimited AI summaries only include paid plans, starting at $3.99 per thirty days. A $14.99 per 12 months and a $44.99 lifetime option are also available.