YEM Brings You Your Personal News Assistant

NEWS is all based on click-baits and algorithms these days, since news turned from 2 updates per day into a 24/7 circus. We are fed with whatever the news channels, or corporates, or PR want to push. This gets tiring and enraging, making us forget to read about what we really like and what is related to our interests.

YEM News is trying to solve this issue by removing the algorithm part from the feed. They have built a personal assistant which gives users control of their feed, so they can stay updated on all their interests. Currently news algorithms end up guessing only two or three of our interests based on our recent activity. Their assistant reads through the daily news for our interests, and then writes custom updates as text, podcasts, or reels customized just for us. They also have an iOS app currently, and the Android app is still in BETA.

We had a detailed talk with Surya Manivannan, the founder of YEM News, about the ideas, goals, and vision of their personalized news app, and understanding the challenges they are facing as a startup. Do read the detailed interview conducted by Desi Founder Team.

What inspired the name “Yem News”? Is there a story or meaning behind it?

There’s no special story behind it. Yem is my brother’s nickname, and since I suck at coming up with names, I just stole his.

How did you come up with the idea for Yem News? What was the initial spark that led to its creation?

I’ve hated following news and this left me missing out on a lot of conversations, because I wouldn’t follow what’s happening. On traditional news apps the articles were too long to read and I could only select broad categories to follow, not my specific interests. On social media I could follow niche content creators but they decided what’s important or not, leading me to miss a bunch of important news. I wanted an easy way to quickly & thoroughly stay updated on certain topics so I made Yem.

What was the biggest challenges you facing in the early days of Yem News, and how are you overcoming it?

Ensuring content quality and reducing hallucination was the biggest problem. To overcome it, I started using more quality sources and broke up my prompts/workflow into multiple chunks to reduce the hallucination.

How is Yem News growing? What strategies are you using to scale the platform?

We are getting users through Reddit. People who are in niche communities like r/australia r/politics, r/robotics, gen AI, etc. We create feeds for those respective niche (podcasts & reels) and try converting these users to Yem by sharing daily updates on these subreddits.

Can you explain the revenue model for Yem News? How does the platform generate income?

Currently Yem is free. We will have a freemium plan as we grow. Free tier will have ads, and only text and podcast, with a limited amount of feeds to create. Premium tier will have no ads, will have reels, and unlimited amount of feeds to create & share on other platforms.

How do you handle the competition from other news curation and personalization platforms?

Other news platforms are mostly just curators. Yem creates its own custom content for each reader. Our main goal is to be a personal news assistant rather than being just another news app.

How do you ensure that Yem News accurately follows users’ interests without getting distracted by their recent behavior?

We don’t have an algorithm to guess the user’s interest based on their behavior. Yem only follows what the users ask for. Basically Yem is your personal assistant.

How is Yem News going to tackle Fake News?

Not sure yet, this is a big problem which we have to tackle down the line.

Can you share any interesting user feedback that has helped shape the development of Yem News?

Yem was a real time news app in the initial days, which led to pool quality. Then users gave feedback by telling us that they don’t care about real time updates, and were just fine with once a day refresh. So I was able to make Yem with more quality and with longer refresh windows.

What technologies and algorithms power Yem News? How do they differ from traditional news algorithms?

Yem runs on LLM’s & vector databases. Traditional news algorithms track user behavior and tries recommending interesting news stories. Yem only gives the user what they explicitly ask for, making it the first app to give the user FULL control over their news feed.

How do you stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in AI and news curation?

I use Yem to follow this haha 🙂

Can you walk us through the process of how Yem News curates and creates custom updates for specific users?

Every user can create a feed. They will specify their interest (topic) and the reason of why they want to follow it. Yem then finds all the relevant news for that particular topic using news api’s and google alerts. By understanding the user’s reason to follow the topic, Yem filters only the relevant news for them. After filtering the relevant news, Yem reads through all these articles and removes the noise to keep only the important information. Finally using this information, Yem creates detailed summaries for the user. Based on the user’s preferred output format, Yem will convert these summaries into podcasts or reels.

How do you balance between automated content generation and human editorial oversight?

I initially set up each feed manually. This is to ensure Yem understands the user’s requirements and I make the prompts correctly. Once this is done, Yem refreshes each feed automatically every day.

What new features or updates can users expect from Yem News in the near future?

Going forward users can follow any topics in their native language. This means a farmer in India can follow all the agricultural developments across the world in their native language. This will remove the language barrier to follow any topic you are interested in.

How do you envision the future of news consumption, and what role do you see Yem News playing in it?

News consumption is generalized right now. There is a lot of repeating and irrelevant information. It takes only about 5 minutes to catch up on everything you missed but since news is made for everybody, it takes a long time to filter through all the noise to get only what you need. News needs to be personalized so everyone can stay updated easily on anything that matters to them.

As a founder, what do you enjoy most about working on Yem News?

I love helping people follow their interests. It’s a problem I faced and helping people solve a similar problem brings happiness to me.

Do you have any memorable moments or stories from your journey with Yem News that you’d like to share?

Not really, sorry 😀

That will be a wrap of the interview. Hope you enjoyed reading it, as much as we enjoyed creating it. If you too have an interesting Founder Story to share it with the world, please feel free to submit a request here.