News Application with AI-Based Chatbot using Flutter

The introduction of mobile technology along with digital media has significantly changed the way we consume news today. The majority of news applications in use today simply provide a curated feed for their users, however, they have very little if any meaningful interaction or user personalization or provide any real opportunity for conversation between the user and the news application. This is the problem we are trying to solve with this project. We developed a new digital news application based on Flutter technology that incorporates an artificial intelligence powered chatbot, enabling individuals to ask questions, receive summaries of articles, receive news catered specifically to their interests, as well as be able to search for news articles through the process of having a conversation with a chatbot. The chatbot uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to provide recommendations for articles based on users' conversations with the chatbot, along with connecting to the Firebase cloud for near instantaneous access to data and faster user engagement. This paper provides an overview of the architecture of our digital news application (DNN), the process of developing our DNN, how the chatbot was designed to work, how the recommendation engine was structured, and the metrics we used to measure the performance of our DNN. In all cases, users can find relevant, interesting and timely content more quickly than they could when using traditional news applications, our DNN provided users with smarter, more contextually relevant responses to their requests, and user retention improved significantly from traditional news to our DNN. The chatbot was both fast and accurate in its responses, and we intentionally designed the app to comply with both GDPR and CCPA privacy legislation. Overall, our approach demonstrates that it is possible to provide a smarter, more personalized news delivery using conversational AI, and that it is scalable