Particles are the startup behind AI-powered news readers that aim to help publishers not only steal their works, but also bring their products to the web. On Tuesday, the company announced it would launch a new particle website that connects news consumers with headlines and AI summaries from a variety of sources, plus capabilities in various categories such as technology, sports, entertainment, politics, science, crime, economics and video games, in addition to browsing the most popular stories of the day on the homepage.

The company believes bringing its products to the network will help attract more readers, thereby keeping up with news by using AI technology enhancements.

Like existing particle mobile applications, the website provides AI tools designed to help consumers better understand the news. Particles not only summarize stories into key points to quickly read, but also extract key quotes and allow users to ask questions about stories through AI chatbots. These questions and answers are available on the new website, but the website does not yet provide the ability to interact directly with AI.

When reading news about particles, if you want to learn more about the topic, you can visit the Entity Page, detailing information about the specific person, product, or organization mentioned in the story. For example, when you highlight the words "Trump" or "Knicks" or "Nintendo Switch" in a title or news summary, you can click on a page that provides basic information extracted from Wikipedia and link to more stories about the topic.

Particles also highlight the news media by sharing links with their stories directly with AI summary, covering a story. In early testing of mobile devices, the company found that readers were clicking on publishers’ websites through these links, causing Particle to start working with specific publishers such as Reuters, Fortune and AFP to highlight their links more prominently.

On the new website, Particle also displays links to relevant reports at the bottom of its AI summary to enable users to click to read more.

Additionally, when users share links in the Particle Mobile app, it will connect readers to a dedicated landing page on the website, opening access to particle content to more readers, including those who do not have the app installed.

The addition of AI in the news and news markets has sometimes caused controversy, especially when some publishers try to outsource reports to AI robots, which has led to a lot of opposition. But the founders of Particle hope to find a way to use AI to help readers understand news better without stealing publishers’ traffic.

Particles were founded in 2023 by Sara Beykpour, former senior director of product management at Twitter and former senior engineers at Twitter and Tesla Marcel Molina. It was backed by $4.4 million in seed funding and $10.9 million in Series A, led by Lightspeed.

Particles join other efforts to leverage AI for news digests, including Yahoo, the former parent of TechCrunch, which acquired the Artifact News app from Instagram's co-founder to use AI-powered features to improve its news app.

Bloomberg, Gannett (USA Today), The Wall Street Journal and others have also been trying out AI article summary. However, readers may be less forgiving AI’s mistakes on news media sites than standalone applications specifically targeting AI Summaries and Q&AS.