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Article in App of the Week category.
Bulletin – AI News Helps Fight Through The Bogus Headlines
During my day job, I read a lot of news. Mostly tech news, but I also appreciate other quality journalism from a variety of different…
During my day job, I read a lot of news. Mostly tech news, but I also appreciate other quality journalism from a variety of different sources. Half the time I'm on X (Twitter) which acts as an RSS feed that also is full of bad opinions. The rest of the time I would just go to different websites because I rarely could find an easy way to bring all the news together that I liked. Bulletin, a new AI-powered app, changes that.
It takes an RSS news feed and then breaks each story into a little, scrollable card. Find a story that interests you. Tap on it to open an overlay of the story from the source. You can hop over to Safari if you want to read it on the site or you can copy the link for sharing. What is so cool though, is its AI chops. For each story, you can tap the magic synopsis button that will generate a Smart Summary of the story. This will break the story down into a few, easily digestible bullet points. It’s much quicker than reading the whole story. The AI can also replace headlines, getting rid of clickbait headlines and making them more accurate. Finally, there’s an “explain like I’m five” option. This summarizes the story in an easy-to-understand way that a child would grasp.
The app is a bit wordy but looks good overall. It has a default black background with dark grey cards overlaid with the news info. Other news apps are a bit more image-heavy, but I still appreciate the look here. You can see the headlines first, followed up by the lede.
A huge benefit here for users is how a single purchase works across all the Apple Platforms. This unified purchase is a feature Apple offers to devs yet so few opt to enable it. Bulletin does and is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Vision Pro. It’s a surprisingly robust list of supported products. I love getting bits of news on my wrist so the Apple Watch app was a huge hit and it was also super useful on Vision Pro where I could read the news in 3D space next to the Apple TV app and my Twitter feed.
Any AI-based app has a monetary cost and that’s understandable. But to me, it’s almost addicting scrolling through the news, getting a Smart Summary before reading the stories I’m excited about. It makes reading the news faster, more enjoyable, and I don’t get nearly as annoyed by clickbait as I did in the past.
But enough about other people's apps.
