Yahoo’s AI push isn’t over yet. The company, also the parent of TechCrunch, recently launched AI-powered features for Yahoo Mailincluding its own take on Gmail’s Priority Inbox and AI message summaries, and today is circulating an AI-powered version of the Yahoo News app, leveraging technology it acquired from its latest acquisition, Artifact. However, Yahoo has more AI plans in the works, including its Yahoo News property on the web.
Code reports on the recently redesigned Yahoo News site have indicated that Yahoo is testing an AI summaries feature, possibly as a way to allow visitors to quickly catch up on news without having to read articles in their entirety.
However, while the Yahoo News app takes lessons from Artifact In terms of offering AI features, the AI summaries feature found in Yahoo News is unrelated to the acquisition of the popular AI news app that was created by the founders of Instagram but was shut down after failing to reach a wider audience.
Yahoo has confirmed that its AI digests on the web have been available in testing for a few months, but those tests are happening on a small, single-digit percentage of article pages in the Yahoo News web experience, the company told TechCrunch. . This would explain why most visitors to the Yahoo News site probably wouldn’t have encountered these AI summaries until now.
The code doesn’t reveal much about the underlying technology Yahoo uses for its AI summaries, only how they would appear to site visitors — in a lightbox, a type of web element used to display content. Yahoo declined to share more about the technology itself or when it would go public. The company has cooperation with OpenAI for the Yahoo News mobile app, however.
Coupled with the Artifact-inspired revamp of Yahoo News and AI features coming to Yahoo Mail, it’s clear that Yahoo is betting on artificial intelligence to give its older web products and services a boost. Whether simply adding AI will attract a new audience, of course, remains to be seen.
