Let’s be honest: No matter your perspective, taking in news these days tends to be a pretty tiring experience.
At best, it’s a bit boring. At worst, it’s anxiety-inducing and mind-melting, often leaving you with more questions than answers.
This week, a whole new kind of news app is officially breaking cover. And, I know—yadda yadda yadda, right? Another “earth-shattering” news app with more of the same as every other app before it?
I had the same thought when I first came across this. Then I started to actually use it. And man alive, lemme tell ya: This is not like any other news app I’ve ever encountered.
It’s fresh, it’s interesting, and it’s absolutely different. And it introduces some truly remarkable high-tech twists that turn news consumption into a uniquely personal and genuinely interactive experience.
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A news app like no other
First things first: While the app we’re about to go over is about as new as can be, it actually comes from a fairly familiar source.
The three guys behind it were among the early developers on Google’s acclaimed NotebookLM tool—one of the first legitimately useful standouts of our current (all-too-often overhyped) AI era.
NotebookLM, if you aren’t familiar, has won over oodles of fans with its clever approach to using AI in a limited, situation-specific way: It analyzes only the documents, web pages, and other info you feed into it and then lets you interact with that info in all sorts of engaging ways.
One of those ways is having the system turn your info into an on-demand podcast—an undeniably intriguing new option for listening to info of your choosing in a conversational, audio-based form.
➜ That’s the same basic philosophy behind Huxe, a cross-platform, audio-centric news app that’s officially available for anyone to use today.
🧠 In short, Huxe lets you specify your areas of interest—anything from technology and productivity to business, health, food, sports, books, and (if you must) current events—along with optionally adding in your location for local news, traffic, and weather updates and, if you really wanna get wild, connecting it to your calendar and/or email so it can include updates from those fronts as well.
🎧 Whatever you pick, each morning Huxe uses your preferences to serve up a single daily news brief made specifically for you. It’s computer-generated, of course, but it sounds like two human hosts performing a podcast solely for your benefit—with a focus on the areas you asked for and as much personalization as you’ve opted to include.
🗣️ Now, here’s where it gets really surreal: While your podcast is playing, you can tap a microphone icon and interrupt it—to ask questions about something, ask for clarifications or more info about a story, or ask anything else that comes to your mind as you’re listening.
Whenever you speak, the “hosts” stop speaking and listen; then, within a matter of seconds, they respond to your request as if they are actually chatting with you. After they’re done addressing your inquiry, they segue naturally back into the rest of your predetermined program.
Here, for instance, I interrupted a segment about some incoming Google Play Store changes to ask whether the new features would be available globally or only in the U.S., for now—which hadn’t initially been mentioned in my podcast. (I turned on live captioning to capture the app’s spoken response.)
☝️ In addition to the standard morning briefings, you can open up Huxe anytime to get an on-the-spot custom podcast update, and you can tune in to a variety of “live stations” with varying themes related to your interests. You can even create your own custom live stations or “DeepCasts” to get instant podcasts on practically any topic imaginable, anytime.
And all of that is still just scratching the surface.
Now, two unavoidable reality checks:
First, could the systems involved here get facts wrong—as AI systems so frequently do?
It’s certainly possible and arguably even likely. AI has thus far proven itself to be extremely fallible and untrustworthy, and that’s in large part just par for the course with the way the underlying technology works.
In my relatively limited experience with Huxe so far, I’ve yet to run into any obvious examples of errant information. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And it’s something I’d strongly suggest anyone using an app like this keep a close eye on and keep top of mind.
Second, is it slightly unsettling how good this is and how human it seems?
Yup—sure is. But is it insanely impressive at the same time and something I could absolutely see being appreciated by an awful lot of people? You’d better believe it.
Whether you end up using the app often or just playing around with it for a while, it’s one seriously cool and impossibly interesting tool that’s well worth your while to investigate.
And hey, who knows? You might just end up loving it.
- Huxe is available for both Android and iOS. There isn’t a web version (yet), but it’ll work on essentially any phone in front of you.
- It’s free to use for the moment, without any asterisks, and I’ve yet to encounter any kind of advertising. I’ve gotta think there’ll eventually be ads integrated into the shows and/or premium subscriptions of some sort offered, but the company hasn’t spoken to any such specifics so far.
- The app does require you to sign in—with either a Google account or an email address—but no other form of personal info is required. Huxe’s privacy policy says the service may use your voice data for improving its system but never uses any personal calendar or email info for training without an explicit opt-in.
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