Facebook is reportedly building a tool called 'TLDR' that will read and summarize news articles for you

• Facebook told employees at a company-wide meeting that it's working on a tool that will read articles and automatically generate summaries of them for users, Buzzfeed reported.
• The AI assistant tool is called "TLDR" (Too Long Didn't Read), and will be audio-enabled so it can read its bullet-pointed summaries out loud.
• Facebook users will supposedly also be able to ask the tool questions about the news and have it reply, Buzzfeed reported.

Facebook is working on a tool that will automatically read news articles for users and generate brief summaries, BuzzFeed reports.

The feature was announced during an end-of-year company all-hands meeting, the report said. Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer presented the tool, which will be called "TLDR" (Too Long Didn't Read, an acronym commonly used online), the publication reported.

TLDR will be an AI-assistant tool, which will automatically generate bullet-point summaries of articles. Schroepfer said the tool would also be voice-enabled, meaning users will be able to have it read summaries out loud to them, Buzzfeed reported.

BuzzFeed's Ryan Mac, who live-tweeted Facebook's end-of-year meeting, said TLDR will be built to answer questions about news stories. "For example, you could ask 'Hey Facebook, how many people will this vaccine help' and it supposedly would spit out an answer," Mac said.

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Facebook was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

At the same meeting, executives touted much more futuristic ambitions, including a neural sensor for letting people control their phones with their thoughts, a universal translator tool, and a VR social network.

Facebook's relationship with the news industry has been fraught at times. The company has been in a long fight with Australian regulators over whether it and other tech giants should pay to license news content shared on its platform.

On December 1 Facebook announced it will pay big media outlets in the UK to license their content as part of a new, dedicated news tab feature.