Charlie

Meet your new, personal journalist

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102 followers

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What if the news was written just for you? ā € Meet Charlie - a balanced, stress-free way to understand the news stories that matter.
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Charlie gallery image
Free
Launch tags:
Androidā€¢Newsā€¢Artificial Intelligence
Launch Team

What do you think? ā€¦

Jim Morrison
Maker
Hi folks, I'm Jim šŸ‘‹ - founder of Charlie. Please ask me, @onesub_lor and @jason_scott2 anything you like. šŸ’¬ We're building Charlie as a way to take the stress & anxiety out of reading the news. We're on a mission to help people get a balanced perspective of the world around them... and Charlie is our way of delivering on that mission. šŸ¤– What is Charlie? Charlie is new way to read the news. A pro-active personal assistant with a deep understanding of the current news cycle, Charlie works to bring you a culturally and politically diverse sample of the day's news. šŸ¤·ā€ā™‚ļø Why do I need Charlie? Most people today read news in one of three ways: 1ļøāƒ£ They only read a few publishers. 2ļøāƒ£ They let a social media algorithm feed them articles. 3ļøāƒ£ They just don't. People in the first two categories miss a great deal of what's happening in the world, while believing they know what's happening. Perception is skewed by what the publishers - or social algos - choose to focus on. Whole perspectives are lost because important stories don't reach the top of a daily news cycle. Charlie's approach is different. Because our algorithm really understands the news - and what what's previously been discussed - Charlie is able to let you know where there are gaps, where you're reading too much on a particular topic or where you're only seeing one side of a debate. And because you're having a discussion with Charlie, your decisions to dive deeper can be lead by calm, genuine interest - not by loud headlines, flashy photography and the content priorities of those who are really just trying to feed you adverts. šŸ† Does Charlie pass the Turing Test? Charlie is still extremely young and has a lot to learn about how you want to communicate, what you want to ask and how to answer all of your questions. While you can ask anything you like, Charlie won't always be able to answer with the alacrity we might expect from a real journalist. If you get lost, please know that Charlie's understanding is improving every day and just by asking new things you're helping their growth. šŸ™Œ Is that everything? Absolutely not. There's SO much I could tell you about how Charlie works, what our aspirations are for their future or what social impact we hope to achieve in the long term. Why not take a quick look - and then come back here to ask me what's on your mind. I will be around all day to answer questions. Thank you so much for taking a look - and thank you @chrismessina for sharing Charlie with the Product Hunt community.
Laura Linham
@jimbomorrison Where is Charlie on the The Voight-Kampff test? :D
Jim Morrison
Maker
@laural Do you really want me to answer that?
Chris Messina
Hunter
I love the premise ā€” getting news that's informative and personalized to you, without the hyperbole and doomscrolliness is so needed in today's hyperconnected, 24-7 livestreamed world. Whether it's a pandemic or the verging on the precipice of World War III, we all need to take a break while still staying informed. @jimbomorrison ā€” tell us about your journey to getting to launch today!
Jim Morrison
Maker
Thanks @chrismessina! šŸ™Œ It's been such an epic year building Charlie. I'm so excited to show them to the world and let people discover a better, calmer way to read the news. You're a gem - thanks again for your support. šŸ’Ž
Antonio Autiero
Congrats on the launch!! The concept looks super interesting, wondering what kind of work (if any) you're doing on fake news and verifying sources.
Jim Morrison
Maker
@antonio_autiero Thanks. Thanks a *REALLY* interesting question. For the moment we're focused on building a great product for the end user - something that takes the anxiety & stress out of staying informed, while making sure nothing important is missed. In large part this approach is defined by the constraints of being a ~boostrapped*, 3-person team start-up... ... so what we're doing at the moment is ensuring that content we recommend is originally sourced from what we understand as being reputable sources (see below) that operate under some level of national legislative oversight. It's risk mitigation, not a solution. We rely a lot on the relationships we've built up with academics, research from the Reuters Institute, research work we've done with NESTA and others to cross-check and validate this approach. Now, Charlie may appear quite facile at the moment. You can see, from our stats (shared here, just now) that they don't understand plenty that people ask them... .. but underpinning Charlie's conversational layer is an increasingly advanced modelling engine which is really concerned with "thing that have happened" - a lower-level construct than just headlines & copy. When we look at things at that level of abstraction it actually becomes easier to identify anomalous assertions. If 99 historically "reputable" sources state and cross-corroborate an event and one source states the opposite, that becomes quite interesting. Of course everything is always more nuanced... but hopefully you see what I mean. One aside (sorry, I don't do quick answers) is that we don't *just* pull data in from our public sources. We're also always looking at a second set of data from places we consider to be less reputable, for research purposes, and .. we also have a Chrome Extension which has a much broader scope of domains on which it will operate and analyse content. The Chrome extension, even with it's moderate little install-base, gives lots of data for research purposes too. Links, if they're useful: āžœ Our Publishers āžœ Our Chrome Extension (under the OneSub brand, fwiw) *bootstrapped: technically we raised GBP~106k in ~2019 - but as you can imagine, that doesn't go very far when people (and servers) have to eat... We feel bootstrapped anyway! šŸ˜†
Laura Linham
@antonio_autiero @jimbomorrison There's a list of all the publishers we've sourced news from over the past 7 days here, too :) https://onesub.io/open/publishers
Riia Jarvenpaa
@antonio_autiero @jimbomorrison @laural It's great that you list your sources, how much you get from each, and where they are based. People can then decide for themselves whether the mix is balanced from their perspective. It also gives credit to the journalists who write the content: many even risk their lives to cover wars and disasters around the world.