Sébastien Noir, Deputy Director, Software Engineering Team, EBU Technology & Innovation
In a news landscape saturated with AI-generated content, users are overwhelmed, lose trust, and come to avoid news more and more. Public service media are under pressure to cut through the noise and provide relevant, solid, and trustworthy news in an engaging way.
EBU Neo aims to help address that challenge by enabling a conversational interface, powered by generative AI, that leverages quality journalism. Neo enables users to ask questions naturally and receive answers drawn from EBU Members’ news content.
Neo is a RAG-based – standing for retrieval- augmented generation – chatbot developed by the EBU. To answer questions, Neo first retrieves news stories relevant to the user’s request and, in a second step, delivers a synthesized response using these articles. Neo leverages the EBU NewsPilot, a powerful news hub that holds over 3.9 million multilingual articles from EBU Members and receives 3,000 new items daily. Unlike commercial AI-based chatbots, Neo is transparent about where its answers come from and provides direct links to the sources. Users are also encouraged to rate responses and help shape continuous improvement.
At the heart of Neo is a sophisticated RAG pipeline: initial steps determine if the request is news-related and appropriate and also extract possible time constraints. On this basis, the hybrid retriever uses keyword-based and semantic searches to find potentially relevant articles. The grader and ranker evaluate the relevance of those articles to answer the user query and provide the best stories to the generator to craft the user response.
First implementation
Neo was initially offered to journalists using the NewsPilot to support editorial research. Following months of refinement, Neo was launched to the public by Sveriges Radio (SR) in Sweden via their mobile app and website. The results were encouraging: in one month, users submitted close to ten thousand queries. Half of all responses were rated 4 or 5 stars. Topics ranged from
geopolitics to local news, with strong interest in Ukraine, the US elections, and domestic politics. Users showed a clear preference for concise, timely answers grounded in trusted sources.
Feedback provided by the users has been a source of invaluable information to improve Neo. Now more questions can be answered, and responses are more relevant.
The user interface was refined and simplified. These changes led to a higher rate of user satisfaction.
For EBU Members, Neo offers both opportunity and insight. It empowers broadcasters to engage audiences directly through their own content, providing a fresh and intuitive interface for news discovery. Integration is simple. And user feedback provides insights to editors, who gain a better understanding of what people care about, when, and why. Neo doesn’t just serve users; it serves the newsroom, delivering actionable intelligence on audience needs and behaviour.
Neo continues to evolve. Future development will include the integration of media indexation, voice interactions, offering different answer styles (expert vs. simplified for accessibility), and supporting ongoing user conversations.
With EBU Neo, public service media can stay ahead of the curve, offering news that is not only accurate, but also accessible, engaging, and responsive to users’ consumption preferences.
In the age of news avoidance, Neo provides solid news, tailoring the content to user needs. It makes news more trusted, personal, interactive, and essential than ever before.
This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of tech-i magazine.