Particle, the startup behind an AI-powered newsreader that aims to help publishers, not just steal their work, is bringing its product to the web. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the new Particle.news website that connects news consumers with headlines and AI summaries from a variety of sources, plus the ability to delve into various categories like Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Politics, Science, Crime, Economics, and Video Games, in addition to browsing the day’s most popular stories on the home page.
The company thinks that bringing its product to the web will help to reach more readers, giving them a different way to keep up with the news using AI technology enhancements.
Like the existing Particle mobile app, the site offers AI tools designed to help consumers better understand the news. Instead of just summarizing stories into key bullet points for quicker reading, Particle also extracts key quotes and allows users to ask questions about the story via an AI chatbot. These questions and answers from users are available on the new website, but the site doesn’t yet offer the ability to interact with the AI directly.
While reading the news on Particle, if you want to learn more about a topic, you can access “entity pages” that detail information about a specific person, product, or organization mentioned in the story. For instance, when you see the word “Trump” or “Knicks” or “Nintendo Switch” highlighted in a headline or news summary, you can click through to a page offering basic information pulled from Wikipedia and links to more stories about the subject.
Particle also highlights the news outlets covering a story by sharing links to their stories directly alongside its AI summaries. In early tests on mobile, the company found that readers were clicking through to the publishers’ sites via these links, leading Particle to begin partnering with specific publishers like Reuters, Fortune, and the AFP to display their links more prominently.
On the new website, Particle also displays links to related reporting at the bottom of its AI summaries to keep users clicking through to read more.
Plus, when users share a link from Particle’s mobile app, it will connect readers with the dedicated landing page on the website, opening up access to Particle’s content to more readers, including those who don’t have the app installed.
The addition of AI into the news and journalism market has been controversial at times, particularly when some publishers attempted to outsource reporting to AI bots, leading to much backlash. But Particle’s founders want to find a way to use AI to help readers better understand the news, without stealing traffic from publishers.
Particle was founded in 2023 by the former senior director of product management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, and a former senior engineer at Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina. It’s backed by $4.4 millio in seed funding and a $10.9 million Series A led by Lightspeed.
Particle joins other efforts to leverage AI for news summaries, including TechCrunch’s former parent company, Yahoo, which acquired the Artifact news app from Instagram’s co-founders to revamp its News app with AI-powered features.
Bloomberg, Gannett (USA Today), The Wall Street Journal, and others have also been experimenting with AI article summaries. However, readers are likely less forgiving of AI’s mistakes on the news outlets’ websites where they’re directly reporting the news, compared with an independent app devoted to AI summaries and Q&As.