Google Assistant’s latest feature: “Tell me something good”

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/google-assistants-latest-feature-delivers-just-the-good-news/

by Mereruka • 8 years ago

108 53 8 years ago

lostimpo2• 8 years ago

This headline was somewhat misleading for me. I interpreted it as some kind of potentially undesirable filter on an existing feature, but it's just an additional command.

The feature is essentially "Hey Google, tell me something good" and Assistant reads out a positive news story. I asked twice and it told me a story about Parkinson's research and how Utah reduced chronic homelessness. It seems like a feature of questionable usefulness but neat nonetheless.

dang• 8 years ago

We changed the headline to make it less misleading, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

augustocallejas• 8 years ago

The downside to just good news:

https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-o...

lmilcin3• 8 years ago

Good news don't typically require instant reaction and thus are not urgent. Our brains are wired to prefer urgent over important.

dqpb• 8 years ago

I suspect this has more to do with the amount of information contained rather than the sentiment of the information.

fixermark4• 8 years ago

Different economics for adding this as an action to Assistant. I'm sure Google will be able to tell from adoption numbers whether this isn't worth maintaining.

ProAm3• 8 years ago

I dont think google makes good editorial decisions.

vorpalhex• 8 years ago

They're shopping this out to a journalistic outlet.

lostimpo2• 8 years ago

From the article:

The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions can have positive results.

Google is not choosing the stories.

ProAm3• 8 years ago

How can that organization be nonpartisan when one of the founder is: "Courtney E. Martin is an American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist" [1] Like I said I have zero faith in Google presenting me not biased, self-interested news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_E._Martin

lmilcin3• 8 years ago

I find it very unsettling that search engines seem to be filtering information based on its knowledge of the user. I understand the article describes a different feature that does basically some kind of mood analysis that does not require the knowledge of the user and, at least currently, must be explicitly invoked by the user.

I have noticed that at some point search engines like Google or Youtube started only showing me results that match my political views. It was actually quite difficult to find any opposing view points.

Now, I think this leads to radicalization as people are further "strengthened" in their opinions seeing that "the Internet agrees" with them.

ams61102• 8 years ago

There's no real political agenda at work here. They are just showing you suggestions for things they think you will watch, so they can serve more ads.

fipple• 8 years ago

But that has political consequences, so in a way it’s a political agenda. Like, if you drive 120mph on city streets, you have a collision agenda, whether that was your intent or not.

lmilcin3• 8 years ago

It may not be political agenda but it has consequences. If left only sees left opinions and right only sees right opinions, how people are to agree on anything if they are never exposed to arguments from other side?

As bad as people are at being unbiased, this is only making things worse, on gigantic scale.

jumpman5002• 8 years ago

Wow. Now they're proud of putting people into information bubbles. This company is showing more and more how disconnected they are from reality and why people are starting not to trust them anymore.

fixermark4• 8 years ago

It's not clear to me how this new option is putting people in an "information bubble" any more than a person deciding to buy a copy of "Chicken Soup For the Soul" instead of "Mindhunter." Can you clarify?

jumpman5002• 8 years ago

Google is deciding that they can know what good news is. Facebook/Google have never tried to put people in information bubbles they just create the systems that enable people to do it to themselves. Everything is avoidable online, but we keep making it harder and harder for people to remain unbiased and share common truths.

datguacdoh• 8 years ago

You should read the article, the headline is very misleading :)

itake• 8 years ago

awesome! one more command to memorize :)

bobmarley1• 8 years ago

ITT: People who only read headlines.

"To activate the feature, Assistant users in the U.S. can say, “Hey Google, tell me something good” to kick off the daily briefing of happy stories."

This is NOT a filter Google puts on your news intake. It IS a gimmick that people can activate like asking it to tell you a joke.

fixermark4• 8 years ago

Exactly. The primary difference (to me personally) being that I'll probably activate this at least once a day. ;)

5Zio• 8 years ago

Please read the article folks. The headline is misleading and and why I usually don't bother with Techcrunch articles.

bearble• 8 years ago

Today my wife and I woke up to, "A Colorado man has been convicted of killing his wife and children."

I would LOVE a feature to disable these types of headlines, this certainly IS NOT it.

jonathankoren• 8 years ago

Sure it is. Just ask for only the good news. It does exactly what you want.

Alex3917• 8 years ago

I had a kid a couple months ago, and now pretty much all of my Google News recommended stories are about kids near me being murdered.

rbanffy2• 8 years ago

Let me tell you a story of one of the largest news portals in Brazil, ig.com.br.

At the time, it was run by a very clever guy who came from the advertising world. He came up with an idea, the "Good News Day". It was to be tied to some ad campaign I don't quite remember now, but it was a day when the news portal could only publish good news.

The editorial staff protested, of course. It's their job to offer news as factually correct and unbiased as humanly possible and they were very unhappy with the idea. In the end, however they relented.

It was about 4AM when a mayoral candidate from a city near São Paulo, was murdered, seemingly for political reasons. Under protests, they held the release.

By 10 AM a plane hit the World Trade Center.

At that point they just published everything and completely ignored the directive. Nothing similar was ever issued again.

To this day, the people who were there regard such initiatives as extremely dangerous.

petra• 8 years ago

So people in Brazil won't know about 9/11(maybe the biggest news event in recent history), for a day. how is it dangerous ?

And i say that as an Israeli, we don't lack drama in our news.I don't listen to the news, and i don't feel i'm risking myself.

untog2• 8 years ago

So people in Brazil won't know about 9/11(maybe the biggest news event in recent history), for a day. how is it dangerous ?

Well, how many people in Brazil had relatives in NYC? Proportionally speaking not many, I'm sure. But some. And their news provider would have overwhelmingly let them down that day. If you move the same principle to an NYC news provider it would be a catastrophic service failure.

finnthehuman• 8 years ago

If someone is willing to avoid learning that story for their own emotional state, what are they doing reading the news in the first place?

rbanffy2• 8 years ago

That was the point the editorial staff said "f_ck this sh_t" and published it, CEO's pet project be damned.

fastball• 8 years ago

There's a balance. Many things in the news are depressing and completely irrelevant to 99.9% of people's lives. That kind of news isn't really necessary.

For example, it is not at all relevant to me to know about when a mother murders her two children, but it definitely has a negative impact on my psyche.

nolok• 8 years ago

While this is a very interesting story in more than one way, and I'm not big on news shaping by editor to tell an overall story rather than give facts, here is how your story doesn't relate to the google feature discussed here: the good news feature doesn't replace the user news, but is specifically requested by the user on each run, by asking specifically for the good news list.

So if someone checked their news on it on that terrible day, they would see both event. If they felt very depressed about it and needed to cheer themselves up, they could ask for a good news of the day; something that they certainly couldn't find on regular news system of the time since the WTC is all they talked about for days.

theDoug• 8 years ago

Seriously. This is about as newsworthy or controversial as when I ask the assistant to tell me something interesting or a joke.

ufuk• 8 years ago

Great story, however, I am afraid, not at all relevant to this product. This Google Assistant feature is supposed to surface "solutions journalism" pieces where the article not only talks about the problems but also potential solutions that are being tested or successfully applied elsewhere.

So the stories are "good" not in the sense of not covering disturbing events but they are "good" in the sense that they offer solutions or ways out of problems. It is not about "what" is covered but more about "how" it is covered.

eksemplar• 8 years ago

I’d actually really like a news media that focused on positive stuff, but also brought the important bad stuff. But 90% of what’s on the 24/7 news sources is currently stuff I didn’t really need to know, so it might as well be less tragic.

conscion• 8 years ago

While your point is true; that filtering news can be dangerous, it's a bit disingenuous for this post. The option to filter to only positive news is a good option.

Users are usually presented news as if it's "unfiltered", but editors chose the stories. It's the illusion of reality when it's actually a constructed narrative. Giving users the option to change the narrative gives perspective on how those narratives are structured.

Eric_WVGG• 8 years ago

Back in the nineties, a journalism professor told our class about an experiment where a local American newspaper tried to publish some minimum percentage of "good news," and their readership tanked.

I cannot find a reference to this story, but a Russian paper tried a similar thing about ten years ago with similar results.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702807

thrill• 8 years ago

I want a feature that delivers Iowahawk-level snark before telling me the news headline.

amhokies• 8 years ago

What about a feature to read just the headlines of articles, since that seems to be what most people do.

smrtinsert• 8 years ago

This is absolutely terrible idea. Studies should be conducted regarding curation of content. As we learned recently, what you read briefly online can change the entire world.

cirenehc• 8 years ago

That's not what this article is saying. It's not curating anything...

mdrzn• 8 years ago

"Tell Me Something Good isn't supported in this region" I mean, it's not like I want national positive news, just give me some happy news.

Google Assistant’s latest feature: “Tell me something good”

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