As more and more news consumers turn to answer engines for information, Time is stepping up its game to hang on to its audience.

The news compamy is doing so by providing a more engaging user experience that mimics what the chat products offer while keeping their own brand front and centre. Time just launched an AI agent with a big splash. 

You’ll recall that Time also launched an AI chat product about a year ago for their Person of the Year feature and a personalised audio briefing a few months ago. This new product combines both of those capabilities and builds further upon them.

“Unlike a traditional chat experience that only accesses information, the agent can leverage a combination of capabilities (or ‘tools’) to fulfill complex natural language requests. For example, a reader can ask to generate an audio briefing summarising the most significant political, economic, and cultural events that occurred in Brazil throughout 2025,” Time said.

“It is not a collection of disconnected AI features but a single interface that combines multiple capabilities into a cohesive and contextual experience.” 

The goal is to let readers explore news dynamically across formats, languages, and perspectives. The new system merges language understanding, voice synthesis, translation, and search into one interface. Readers can ask questions, generate summaries, create audio stories, and translate reports.

For example: Readers can generate a five-minute audio summary of recent interviews with world leaders, highlighting key themes and quotes, or stage a multilingual debate drawn from archival coverage around a question like “Is AI good for humanity?” 

It is initially available only for topics such as politics and entertainment. Readers come across the agent through a horizontal box that says “Ask me anything” and is sticky across the bottom of their screen once they start reading an article. Clicking on the box triggers a range of prompts they can use to explore the news:

The news brand hopes to deepen reader engagement and facilitate greater cross-content and cross-modality exploration (e.g., text and audio, as well as comparisons) across its content. It also wants to attract new and diverse audiences by offering highly flexible and personalised formats. Time’s content can be presented in 13 languages.

Time COO Mark Howard said the AI agent exists to amplify editorial judgment. It operates within strict editorial guidelines — author attribution and source citation are always preserved — and it uses both input filters and adversarial testing techniques to make it harder to manipulate the system. 

The agent was developed in collaboration with Scale AI (Time also has agreements with OpenAI and ElevenLabs and, you’ll recall, is owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff).

An LLM analyses requests made in natural language and breaks them down into sub tasks. The agent is also connected to a constantly updated index of Time’s 102 years of content to ensure responses are grounded in verified knowledge and can access a suite of tools such as summarisation engines, translation services, and a podcast generation API.

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