Most kids aren’t even reading the news at 15, let alone building a tool to read it faster.
Then again, most kids aren’t Tanay Tandon, the 15-year-old prodigy behind Clipped, a new app that scans news articles and generates a bulleted list of the most important information.
Tandon originally built Clipped to help him prep for debate club. (What’s more, a testimonial on his website comes from “a kid in my Spanish class.”)
The patent-pending algorithm works by analyzing sentence structure to identify keywords. The information is then laid out in a series of bullet points, allowing the reader to skim any article in seconds.
Clipped, which has apps for iPhone and Android as well as a bookmarklet for web browsing, works best on traditional news stories; it stumbles a bit on feature or opinion-based content, though Tandon is constantly working to improve the tool’s comprehension skills.
After finishing his homework, of course.