A CONFLICT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE GAVE ME AN IDEA
You probably have heard about the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine? I live in Helsinki Finland, so this conflict has almost been next door to us. The media has done their job and covered the story in detail.
But after awhile the constant news stream about the conflict started to fade and suddenly the news papers was again filled with great articles about lottery winners and sports.

A BING SEARCH? THANKS SIRI…
When the news feed started to fade my attention towards the conflict started to fade as well. A week later or so me and my girlfriend had a discussion about the conflict. We both realised that our insights about the topic was at least one week old, since the news channels had stopped cover this story.
I did a google search and ended up with 194 000 000 search results (too much of a hassle to find the right articles), I turned on the news (nothing), I even tried asking Siri and she did a Bing search for me… (Maybe Microsoft’s Cortana can tackle this challenge, who knows?)

SO I GOT AN IDEA
What if Siri, Google Now or Cortana could answer these kind of questions for me? I understand that the back end and algorithms required to automatically generate a summary, of the conflict in this case, and also a report on the current status is very advanced. Probably this is the reason why this feature is not supported today or maybe not enough interest from the market.
But still, Apple, Google or Microsoft could just partner with a major news company which would provide them with news related to global conflicts and events. It would require some manual work to produce these summaries, but until they have figured out how to generate these type of answers automatically I think it’s worth it.

AL JAZEERA AND AJ+
Since I started writing this article Al Jazeera has released their application AJ+, which simply creates stacks of simplified news articles and videos related to a hashtag, for instance #OccupyCentral.
Now one idea could be to integrate a feature like this into Google Now, Siri and Cortana. So when I ask for the latest status of the Russia and Ukraine conflict I will get a nice stack of simplfied news articles and videos covering the conflict up until now. When thinking about it, why not let app developers build in direct support from their apps into Siri for instance? So when I ask a news related question to Siri I will get a stack of news from my installed AJ+ app directly in the Siri reply. That would be very nice.

In my oppinion this would be one step closer towards a seamless platform.

Thank you for reading.