Readability announces a major update to their engine Iris

Readability has announced a major update to their engine. They have named the update Iris.

The company said:

With Iris, we’ve built an engine that you might call abstract—inspired by IBM’s Watson, the machine that beat contestants on Jeopardy!, Iris’ first order of business is to figure what type of content source is at hand. It analyzes a page, determines the likely context based on a number of factors and extracts what a human would expect as meaningful information from that source. Each context is fully malleable, and can be modified and improved upon individually.

This results in a dramatically improved user experience across the myriad apps, services and tools built on Readability. Expect better results on all sites, even non-article pages on sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Vimeo and many more.

Users of their platform would start seeing the updates in the coming hours. Developers using their APIs have access to the new functionalities right away. We are big fans of Readability here and are pretty excited to see the benefits of this update.