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p/charlie-2030631f-dbb0-409b-a3ac-988bd5af6117Meet your new, personal journalist
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Chris Messina

Charlie - Meet your new, personal journalist

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Top Hunter
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What if the news was written just for you?
⠀
Meet Charlie - a balanced, stress-free way to understand the news stories that matter.

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Jim Morrison
Maker
Hi folks, I'm Jim 👋 - founder of Charlie. Please ask me, @onesub_lor and @jason_scott2 anything you like. 💬 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. 🤖 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. 🤷‍♂️ Why do I need Charlie? Most people today read news in one of three ways: 1️⃣ They only read a few publishers. 2️⃣ They let a social media algorithm feed them articles. 3️⃣ 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. 🏆 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. 🙌 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
Top Hunter
Hunter
I love the premise — 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 — tell us about your journey to getting to launch today!
Jim Morrison
Maker
Thanks @chrismessina! 🙌 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. 💎
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: ➜ Our Publishers ➜ 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! 😆
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.
Tb
I've tracked this team as they developed OneSub and it went from strength to strength very quickly. I love their transparency too - they are open, honest and communicative. I think Charlie will be a great front end for OneSub and will make getting the news more appealing.
Jim Morrison
Maker
@tim_bene Thank you so much Tim. It's been quite a 🎢 rollercoaster but we're definitely super-excited about what Charlie has to offer the world. What are your first impressions on meeting them?
Natalka Chekh
As a person from Ukraine, where is war currently going on, I really find it very useful to stay informed and at the same time don't be overtaken by depressing news feed. (and also appreciate that there is a tweet of our president on your product's screenshot :) )
Jim Morrison
Maker
@natalka_chekh I'm a bit speechless, to be honest Natalka. First of course, thank you for taking the time to look at our little product and to comment so kindly. Second I'm so exceedingly sorry for what is happening to your beautiful country and to your brave compatriots. Finally, on the screenshot - we felt it was a small but fitting tribute to a man who appears to be one of the world's few genuinely good leaders. That so many huge nations are lead by nasty little men consumed by self-interest, ego & greed is, in my opinion, closely linked to the way that we disseminate information to our populations through our social and news media. However unrealistic a goal it may be; it's my heartfelt hope that Charlie and the OneSub family of products can be just a small part of turning back the tide of divisive, high-octane news that propagates populists and tyrants into power in the first place. I do hope you, your family and your friends in Ukraine are as safe as they possibly can be.
Adam Janower
I like this idea quite a bit. I've tried following IRL journalists that attempt to accomplish similar goals on social media, but the push vs pull and the single source have left me unsatisfied. I'm thinking about distilling multiple sources' biases into Charlie's bias. Do you have any plans to demonstrate the breadth of the political spectrum the user is consuming?
Jim Morrison
Maker
@adam_janower Great question Adam, thanks. Short answer - yes, 💯 Long answer - Charlie calculates and understands your reading history across ~500,000 topics in real-time and for ~14 days (after which we delete the data, though we plan to add a paid-tier if you want to keep the data for longer). That data should be available to the inquisitive user in detail, on demand, and nudged to the less inquisitive user when particularly germane. You can get a sense of where we're heading from the slides on our Product Hunt page - in the carousel, to the right of the video... Aside: Interestingly, journalistic bias takes two particularly interesting forms - one we talk about and one we don't, so much. The first - the obvious one - is "how" a publication portrays certain people, events or opinions. The second - the less obvious one - is "what" a publication choses to even mention. In the UK as you will see in the US, we'll have whole stories, running for weeks, that some major publishers will barely mention... while other papers are obsessing about those topics to the exclusion of things the first group are discussing. Of course this second pattern is amplified geographically; where we are all a bit too self-interested in domestic affairs at the expense of understanding the cultural perspectives of the vast majority of humans that don't live in whatever country we live in. One of the things therefore that I like about Charlie (and OneSub, Charlie's older sister) is that I see a broader spectrum of news - not just both sides of the debate, but loads of debates that I might otherwise miss. Sure, it's a nascent little product with a tiny team and long way to go - but we've broken the back of the underlying technology and for us it's all spit & polish from here in. Quality control, broadening our publisher input, tweaking the comprehension and above all, improving how we communicate our flavour of hyper-personalisation to and audience inured to advertiser-lead dopamine hacking. Finger crossed we can get it right! 🤞
Adam Janower
@jimbomorrison Thanks for the thoughtful response. Best of luck in what's next! I'm checking out the slides now.
Jeff
Congrats & good luck!
Jim Morrison
Maker
@jesv Thanks Jeff! Do let me know if you've any thoughts, ideas or feedback! Charlie is super-keen to learn how to interact now they're out of the box.
Shivank Kulshreshtha
Nice product, congrats on launch
Jim Morrison
Maker
Thanks @shivank_kulshreshtha - that's really appreciated. 🙌 Let me know if you've any questions at all.
Sukanto Mondal
It is very useful to have an app like CHARLIE, Thank you for launching this product!
Jim Morrison
Maker
@sukanto_mondal Thank you so much Sukanto. Have you met Charlie yet - I'd love to know what your first impressions have been?
Laura Linham
Morning everyone! I'm Laura 😊 I'm a journalist who has worked on the newsy part of Hey Charlie (I'm bad at tech. I have to look at a controller for the letter on the button I have to press, and even Alexa doesn't do anything I ask her to). But if I can help with questions about the news/journalism angle of Hey Charlie, I'll be here all day 👍 Your support means everything to us - thank you so much!
Nick Howland
I’ve been waiting to try out Charlie since I first heard about the app in development. Really pleased that day has now arrived and congrats to the team for its launch. I’ve downloaded the iOS app already, seems to work really well and ultra convenient. I’ll be trying it out for my daily news source for sure.
Jim Morrison
Maker
@nickhowland Amazing, thanks Nick! As the days go by you should find that Charlie starts to learn more about what you're missing. Let me know how it goes!
Amartya Bhargava
Have been looking out for this product! Thanks for building this :) great use of chatbot concept.
Jim Morrison
Maker
@amartya_bhargava Thank you so much Amartya! Really appreciate that. Here's hoping that chatting with Charlie becomes part of your daily routine. 🙌
Amartya Bhargava
@jimbomorrison Excited to use it soon. We have also launched our product today which is also a chatbot use case for skill assessments, would be grateful if you can review and give feedback :)
Jim Morrison
Maker
... so one of the super important things about building Charlie is being as transparent as possible from the outset. So, if you're interested: ➜ all of our stats are public (thanks @markosaric, @ukutaht & Plausible Analytics!) -- Our Web Stats ➜ loads of other metrics are public - see our Open Stats page and the image I hope I've added to this comment. If you have any other questions you'd like to ask me or the other makers - or stats you'd like to see, just let us know!
Mustafa Yilmaz
Looks really interesting as someone who consumes their daily news from highly curated sources in flipboard and reddit (working on it since 2015 I think) this might be a good alternative to clear the mind from asking is this reliable? will definitely try :)
Jim Morrison
Maker
@mustafa_yilmaz Thanks Mustafa. We'd be fascinated to know what you make of Charlie after a few days. Their ability to track evolving stories over time should give you an intriguingly different experience to Flipboard (which I've loved for a long time) & Reddit. What's your first impression?
Sarah Gibbon
It’s about time we could have a personal news assistant we can trust-congrats on the 🚀
Jim Morrison
Maker
@sarah_gibbon Thank you so much Sarah. Do let us know your first impressions on meeting Charlie! 🤖
Maria Alexandrova
It looks great. Congratulations on your launch!
Jim Morrison
Maker
@maria_alexandrova1 Wow, thanks Maria! Let me know what your first impressions are when you meet!
Thịnh Đinh
Great product. I just started chatting with Charlie in the browser and I noticed there's an additional "the" here. Otherwise it looks impressive! Congrats on the launch.
Jim Morrison
Maker
@thinhcdinh1504 Oh wow! Thanks! I'll take a look at that right away.
Benedikt Bauer
I really like that Charlie gives you only slightly growing chunks of information until you start to really really bug them for more info. That keeps the information density at just the right level. I'm wondering: Will Charlie also learn how much info I usually want or will they always just provide me with the headlines / short summaries at first? At least the Android version still has some minor problems, but I'm looking forward to get my International news from now two great products by this Team. 👍
Jim Morrison
Maker
@mastacheata Thank you so much Benedikt. An international version is on the way! 🚀
Basharath
It's an interesting product. Congrats on the launch!
Jim Morrison
Maker
@basharath Thank you! ... and thank you! 🙌
Deep Dave
Not available for India yet. Any plans to make it available? @jimbomorrison
Jim Morrison
Maker
@deephdave absolutely! To manage our underlying costs, we don't have a huge amount of coverage for publishers in India at the moment... but we 💯 plan to add support. For now, you can chat to Charlie on the web at charlie.news - to get a sense of how they work. Do you want to give that a go and let me know how you get on?
Jim Morrison
Maker
@deephdave I've had an idea (or @rahulchowdhury has given me an idea) Deep... If you like, you can download & play with the beta versions (currently identical to what's in the AppStore) - They should both open in all regions: ➜ Android ➜ iOS