Microsoft has issued a new update for the News Pro application on the iOS platform, bringing a number of new features to the service. News Pro is a project from Microsoft Garage, Redmond’s skunkworks collaborative division that lets employees work on apps and services that will not be launched as a core Microsoft product.
The app is a news aggregator that arrived earlier in the year and on its iTunes page Microsoft sums up the service like this:
“Find articles and topics you didn’t know you needed. News Pro allows you to extend the scope of your daily news updates by suggesting new topics to search based off your current interests and by helping you discover websites where you can read articles that are interesting to you. You can also search for news related to any topic right in the app so you can always be fully informed.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwwhWx4R3jI
You may remember last month Microsoft Garage introduced News Pro 2.0, which was not a new service but merely a significant update to the original app. That upgrade brought with it the ability to participate in Groups and a personal “news agent” bot called Rowe, which can help users find the content they want.
Rowe has been given an enhancement in the new update for iOS (version 2.1), with the bot scoring a better keyboard layout in the roll out. Other changes users can expect in the new build include an improved search bar that includes groups and people search functions, better performance for the general app, and bug fixes of course.
If you want to know more about the larger News Pro 2.0 update from May, check out the video above which sheds more light on Rowe’s capabilities.
