Alright, I think we can all agree the news these days are not exactly cheery. It’s enough to open the TV on any news channel or skim through the news feeds on your social media of choice to find out more than enough material to crush your faith in humanity.
The guys and girls over at Google probably felt that too, and decided we could all use some nice things to hear about now and then. The company announced that they are currently testing a pilot of a new feature for Google Assistant called “Tell me something good“.
The feature will give the users a more rose-colored news feed and focus on the stories of people who are “solving problems for our communities and our world,” according to Google. In order to activate the feature, the U.S users can just say “Hey Google, tell me something good” and Google Assistant will take care of the rest.
Credit: Google / YouTube
The good news you’ll hear about could be anything ranging from how backyard beekeepers in East Detroit are balancing out the endangered bee population, to how Iceland managed to curb teen drinking by offering coupons for kids to access extracurricular activities. The stories will be coming from many media outlets, all of them summarized and curated by the Solutions Journalism Network.
The group is a nonprofit that dedicates itself to highlighting how problems can be solved and that doing better is not an impossible task, all via solutions journalism. Google News intends to balance the news ‘diet’ this way in order to fight the stress the constant flux of negative news brings along.
Obviously, the feature will not magically fix everything, but if you’re having a bad day where the entire world seems like a bad place to be in, hearing about a few good things happening out there in the world might make a bit of a difference.
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