Yahoo’s AI push isn’t over just yet. The company, also TechCrunch’s parent, recently launched AI-powered features for Yahoo Mail, including its own take on Gmail’s Priority Inbox and AI summaries of emails, and today it’s rolling out an AI-powered version of its Yahoo News app, leveraging technology it acquired from its latest acquisition, Artifact. Still, Yahoo has more AI plans in the works, including for its Yahoo News property on the web.
Code references on the newly redesigned Yahoo News website indicated that Yahoo is testing an AI summaries feature, presumably as a way to allow visitors to quickly catch up on the news without having to read articles in their entirety.
However, while the Yahoo News app is taking learnings from Artifact when it comes to offering AI features, the AI summaries feature found on Yahoo News is not related to its acquisition of the well-liked AI news app that had been created by Instagram’s founders, but had shut down after failing to reach a wider audience.
Reached for comment, Yahoo confirmed that its AI summaries on the web have been available in testing for a few months, but those tests are occurring on a small, single-digit percentage of article pages on the Yahoo News web experience, the company told TechCrunch. That would explain why most visitors to the Yahoo News website would not have likely encountered these AI summaries as of yet.
The code doesn’t reveal much about the underlying technology Yahoo is using for the AI summaries, only how they would appear to site visitors — in a lightbox, a type of web component used for displaying content. Yahoo declined to share more about the technology itself or when it would launch publicly. The company does have a partnership with OpenAI for its Yahoo News mobile app, though.
Combined with the Artifact-inspired revamp of Yahoo News and the AI features that arrived on Yahoo Mail, it’s clear that Yahoo is betting on AI to give its older web products and services a push. Whether simply adding AI will attract a new audience, of course, remains to be seen.