You may recall that last month Yahoo acquired the natural language news article summarizing app Summly for the estimated sum of $30 million.
The technology, which was created by 17 year-old British student Nick D’Aloisio, condenses long stories into easy to digest summaries that readers can quickly scan to see if they want to click-through for the full article. In a case of the technology being more valuable than the app, at the time of the acquisition the Summly app was removed from the App Store and Yahoo said they’d be improving and incorporating D’Aloisio’s algorithms into future products.
Well, it appears that Yahoo has wasted no time doing this as they just recently updated their free Yahoo! mobile app with “Summaries by Yahoo!”, a feature that utilizes the Summly tech to give brief, but natural sounding summaries for articles in the app’s news stream.
From the examples I’ve seen so far, it seems to do a really nice job of summarizing article content. The odd thing is that the feature is not enabled by default, users after to enabled “Visual” mode from within the app to see the summaries. Right now it also appears that summaries are not available for all articles, so perhaps Yahoo! is still doing a bit of tweaking to optimize the algorithms. Either way, it is great to see Yahoo! using this tech and not letting it sit on a shelf for a long time before actually rolling it out.
Yahoo may have lost the search engine war, but over the last month or so, they have been making some impressive strides in the iOS mobile App space, with their amazing weather app and hefty improvements in the news and mail apps as well.
Now if Yahoo! could just figure out a way to build a book report writing app utilizing the Summly tech, they’d have a gold mine on their hands!
Download the Yahoo! mobile app:
