The Yahoo News Digest app has been announced for Android and iOS in India and Singapore for users who prefer getting the day’s headlines from their mobile gadget instead of a newspaper. In other words, for everyone who visits the web for their daily dose of stories and thinks Google News can do better.
Yahoo News Digest was released for audiences in the US and the UK early this year and the company obviously feels its efforts have paid off. It says that 40% of people who’ve started using the application keep coming back to it. Stories are sectioned off into categories such as News, Sports, Business, Technology and World amongst.
Yahoo purchased Summly, a summarization and artificial intelligence technology, in 2013 and it looks like the company made good use of its acquisition. The News Digest app ‘algorithmically and editorially’ picks relevant stories and makes ‘Atoms’ out of them. The Atoms contain posts, infographics, maps, bits from Wikipedia, videos, images and more.
There’s a homescreen widget showing your most recent unread digest so you know what you haven’t read and can easily skip to unread articles. The one issue with the application is that it gets updated only twice a day. Erm, so it’s good if you’re upgrading from a rolled up newspaper to the internet, right? It would feel like going a bit backwards in time to anyone who keeps getting their headlines from Twitter or specific news websites.
The Yahoo News Digest app can be downloaded from Google Play Store or iTunes.