AI turns news into a conversation

In 2025, we won’t just read the news — we’ll talk to it, and it will talk back.

News will transform from something we passively consume to something we actively experience through voice-first AI that turns text into conversation and readers into participants. I’m talking about unleashing the most powerful form of human communication — conversation — to revolutionize how we understand our world.

The future of news is moving beyond the written word. With AI at its core, it’s conversational, spoken, interactive, responsive, and deeply personal — the very essence of meaningful human communication. Imagine sitting down with your morning coffee and saying, “Tell me what I need to know today.” Your AI companion doesn’t just read the headlines — it engages you in a personalized, conversational dialogue about the news that matters most to you. It understands your context, interests, and knowledge gaps. It can challenge your assumptions, present diverse perspectives, and guide you through complex topics with the patience and adaptability of a personal journalist.

Curious about a complex geopolitical crisis? Don’t just read about it — discuss it.

Want to unpack the implications of new economic policies, or explore stock market trends affecting your investments? Have a conversation about them.

Interested in local issues? Engage in a dialogue that connects global trends to your neighborhood.

This isn’t speculation — we’re on the cusp of this future. At Newsroom Robots Labs, which I’m incubating at the Harvard Innovation Labs, our work focuses on demonstrating how newsrooms can incorporate conversational AI into their daily work, identifying practical use cases that enhance journalistic capabilities. Meanwhile, our product labs are reimagining how audiences could interact with information in entirely new ways, building conversational experiences that transform passive readers into active participants.

The technological advancements of 2024 make this conversational future inevitable. Until recently, developers had to integrate multiple models to power speech-to-speech experiences, often sacrificing emotion and emphasis with noticeable latency, disrupting the natural flow of conversations.

Now, with OpenAI’s Realtime API, developers can create voice applications that capture the nuances of human conversation — all through a single API call. It even handles interruptions, as demonstrated by ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. Meanwhile, Meta’s Spirit LM represents another leap forward: an open-source multimodal language model that seamlessly integrates text and speech, enabling more expressive and fluid interactions across formats. Just this month, Eleven Labs introduced their own conversational AI platform. It’s an all-in-one solution for creating customizable, interactive voice agents that manage turn-taking and interruptions with the fluidity of human conversation.

Even more transformative advancements are on the horizon. Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, introduced this year, promises to revolutionize AI processing with a 2.5× performance boost over its predecessor. This next-generation GPU technology is set to power even more responsive and natural conversational AI applications.

We’re already seeing audiences embrace this conversational approach. The popularity of Google’s NotebookLM audio overviews feature demonstrates the growing demand for AI-powered podcast-style discussions. Eleven Labs has now taken this further, integrating similar capabilities directly into their Eleven Reader mobile app, making conversational content creation accessible to anyone on the go.

It’s plausible to predict the next evolution: These AI-powered discussions will move beyond one-way listening to real-time dialogue, where users can interrupt, ask questions, and engage in genuine conversation with the information itself. This will transform passive content consumption into dynamic, interactive understanding.

The traditional model of journalism — write, publish, and hope readers understand — is fundamentally misaligned with how humans naturally process and engage with information. It’s even less aligned with how the younger generations consume content and the interactive, dynamic possibilities that AI enables for the future.

Think about the last time you explained a complex topic to a friend. Did you write them an essay? Of course not. You had a conversation — responding to their questions, adjusting to their level of understanding, and building meaning together through discussion. This is how humans naturally learn and understand, yet we’ve confined ourselves to the straitjacket of one-way publishing simply because that’s what technology previously allowed.

Now technology can finally match how humans naturally share information. It will transform how news fits into daily life for diverse audiences. For busy professionals, it delivers focused, interactive briefings that fit between meetings. For younger audiences, it provides dynamic discussions that match their preference for conversational engagement. For commuters, it offers rich audio experiences that turn traffic time into learning time. For students, it provides deeper context through adaptive, personalized insights that connect to their coursework.

At the same time, it’ll break barriers for those traditionally underserved. For someone with visual impairments, it transforms news into a rich audio discussion. For a non-native speaker, it patiently explains unfamiliar terms. For someone overwhelmed by world events, it acts as a compassionate guide, helping them engage at their own pace. This isn’t just about convenience — it’s about meeting people where they are and making quality journalism truly accessible to everyone.

This new technology presents both an opportunity and an imperative for news organizations to fundamentally reimagine their role. It’s no longer about adapting articles for voice interfaces. (That’s like early web publishers asking how to make their printed pages look good on screens.) Instead, it’s about designing systems that architect understanding through conversation.

In this new era, the organizations that will dominate journalism will be those bold enough to rethink their entire approach to news delivery around conversation. They’ll replace static articles with “story spheres”: rich, multidimensional spaces of information that AI can navigate through dialogue. A breaking news story might begin with current developments but can seamlessly branch into historical context, expert analysis, or related global impacts based on the reader’s questions and interests. They’ll pioneer “narrative AI” capable of weaving complex stories into personalized, interactive conversations. And they’ll redefine the role of journalists, transforming them from writers into conversation architects who structure information for dynamic, AI-driven discovery.

The entire concept of “publishing” will begin to evolve. Stories won’t be finished when they’re published; they’ll come alive through millions of unique conversations. Breaking news will no longer be about being first to print — it’ll be about facilitating the most meaningful, real-time dialogues as events unfold.

The printing press democratized access to information. The internet democratized the ability to publish. The AI revolution will democratize understanding itself through the most human interface of all: conversation.

The economic opportunities are staggering. Imagine monetizing not pageviews or subscriptions, but the depth and quality of AI-driven news conversations. Imagine offering premium access to specialized AI analysts for niche topics, where audiences pay for deeper, more personalized insights. Imagine news organizations transforming into centers of living knowledge, their AIs engaging millions in simultaneous, personalized dialogues — all while upholding rigorous editorial standards and fact-checking protocols.

The future of news isn’t about reading words on screens. It’s about engaging in conversations that transform information into understanding, facts into insights, and observers into participants. It’s about making news as natural as conversation and as powerful as human curiosity.

For newsrooms, 2025 is the year to be bold. To stop thinking about how to adapt existing formats to new technologies and instead start reimagining news as an ongoing, dynamic dialogue with humanity. To stop writing for readers and start designing for participants. To stop publishing articles and start architecting understanding. The tools are here. The technology has arrived. This is our moment to revolutionize how we deliver news and how humanity understands its own story.