Smasheda brand new app curating one of the best of the online from the co-founder of Goodreads Otis Chandleris now open to the general public. Like Goodreads, the app goals to create a community around content. But this time the main target just isn’t on books, but on web content – like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts and more. Additionally, Smashing introduces an AI Questions feature that lets you engage with shared content in other ways, including a message from different perspectives or asking the AI to poke holes within the story.
When you take a look at a story from different angles, you’ll be able to see how each the political left and right view the difficulty. However, within the case of an organization stock, you can even be presented with each the bull and bear cases.
Chandler says there are a very good handful of AI prompts available at launch, and never all of them will probably be useful for each news story or piece of content. For example, there may be a silly “Make it funny” prompt and others that may simplify the story, show a timeline, or introduce “unconventional” approaches that will require considering outside the box and assist you weigh ideas beyond You haven't thought of it yet. If you would like, you may as well ask your individual questions.
“For example, I enjoyed asking it to jot down me a podcast script, then plug it into Notebook LM and take heed to it within the automobile,” says Chandler.
In the app, users can create multiple interest feeds to not sleep so far on the topics that matter to them like politics, investing, parenting, health and wellness, etc., and even narrower interests like specific corporations, sports teams, cryptocurrencies, etc. Climate change or other subtopics.
The app also uses AI to display content from across the online after which match it to a person reader based on what articles they have an inclination to read, what subtopics they like, and what’s already popular in the neighborhood, determined through upvotes and downvotes. Taken together, the signals tailor Smashing to a user's particular interests.
As a part of the AI Questions feature, Smashing can also be introducing AI-powered story overview pages, which feature grouped articles, blog posts, and social media posts around the identical story.
Since announcing Smashing plans this summer, the startup has added greater than 2,000 people to its waitlist and a number of other thousand are testing the beta. Since then, Chandler says its AI algorithms have improved “significantly,” because of fine-tuning, a greater user experience that enables readers to mark whether things are interesting or not, a bigger community of curators, and general improvements through the rapidly developing LLM models available.
The smashing happens first available in iOS and has an online version in development. The startup is backed by $3.4 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures and plenty of angel investors.
