After the shutdown of animated AI news app Artifact from the founders of Instagram, a new application called Newsletter is also now turning to AI to help remove clickbait and summarize the day’s news. Except in this case, users can customize the news sources and features of the app, as you would in any other RSS reader, instead of relying on a curated news selection, like Artifact did it. AI integration, meanwhile, helps remove clickbait headlines from your news reading experience. Additionally, with a single click you can access a summary of the article or even all articles in the feed.
Bulletin was created by developer Shihab Mehboob, a prolific Independent developer who recently sold its client Juggernaut Mammoth in Mozilla. Mehboob Notes, the app works on Apple devices including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and even Apple Vision Pro. (An Apple TV version will also arrive shortly after launch.)
Image credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
Getting started with the news app is simple as it comes with a set of default feeds for different news categories including world news, technology, entertainment, business, sports, fashion and more Again. However, you can personalize this experience if you want, adding or removing streams in the app settings to make it your own.
As you browse sections, you can choose to enhance news article headlines using AI – a feature designed to help combat clickbait headlines – as well as tap the “ Smart Summary” for a quick ChatGPT-style summary of the article. main points. Mehboob says he uses OpenAI’s GPT to manage AI components.
Image credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
These options are reminiscent of some of Artifact’s best features, in that it also offered a a variety of AI-powered news summaries, including those in a range of styles, such as “explaining like I’m five”, or for fun, in Gen Z language, or using only emojis, among others. Bulletin doesn’t go that far, although it does offer an “explain like I’m five” alternative to the default summary style, for more complex news, perhaps. Helpfully, it can translate summaries into your local language and offers a native “Copy Summary” button so you can save or share the news in another app.
Not all titles benefit from the “Improve Title” clickbait removal option, but in some cases it can be useful. For example, a Kotaku article titled “The Most Ambitious Space Game Ever Made Is Free This Weekend” is renamed more accurate and comprehensive “No Man’s Sky Offers Free Weekend Trial With Omega Update” .
Within each news section, you can also catch up quickly by tapping the AI button at the top right of the screen, whose star icons resemble those used by Google. Gemini. After tapping, the AI smart summary will appear overlaid on your screen, offering a bulleted list of the top news stories in that section.
Image credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
In Bulletin’s settings, you can turn off news categories you don’t want to browse, as well as individual news sources included in the app by default. It also helps you personalize the app’s For You feed, which features articles across all sections. But what makes the app convenient for power users and heavy news consumers is that you can also add any other website that offers an RSS feed to the app.
Image credits: Bulletin/Shihab Mehboob
One problem with this feature is that you can’t just add the website URL like you can in other RSS readers like Feedly, so that the application automatically discovers the associated RSS feed. Instead, you will need to copy and paste the full RSS feed URL into the box provided. This could be a challenge because many websites today no longer bother to display the orange RSS icon that takes you to their feed because RSS has gone out of fashion. Instead, you often have to discover the RSS feed on your own using a browser plug-in or RSS reader that can determine which feed is right for you.
One smart feature is the ability to use iOS Live Activities to put a news ticker on your lock screen (but you can turn this off if you want.)
Later, Mehboob wants to add support for tracking social media updates in the app, similar to Tapestry, the new application in development from The Iconfactory, which combines RSS feeds, news alerts and social networks in a single interface. The Bulletin developer told TechCrunch that Mastodon and Bluesky would “most likely” be its first candidates once it moves in that direction, but didn’t share a timeline.
Newsletter is free to use but AI features are not. The anti-clickbait option and the ability to view unlimited AI summaries are only available with paid plans, starting at $3.99 per month. A $14.99 per year lifetime option and a $44.99 lifetime option are also available.
