Internally at Google, leadership set a goal to drive daily active users for the Assistant. To achieve the goal, Google would need to go beyond surface level interactions to build daily interactions that were simple, demonstrable, sticky, and surface agnostic.

At the same time, out in the world, people were avoiding the news because it made them feel bad. And, a new movement called solutions journalism was proven through academic research to leave readers feeling hopeful and empowered. Solutions journalism is all about hard hitting, comprehensive reporting spotlighting adaptive responses to societal problems so collectively we can self-correct.

So we built an Assistant feature that gives users a daily dose of good news (as solutions journalism) with a simple, sticky query: “Tell me something good”.

“Tell me something good” is a feature for Assistant users in the U.S. that delivers your daily dose of good news. Just say “Hey Google, tell me something good” to receive a brief news summary about people who are solving problems for our communities and our world.

This is good news like how Georgia State University coupled empathy with data to double its graduation rate and eliminate achievement gaps between white and black students and how Iceland curbed teen drinking with nightly curfews and coupons for kids to enroll in extracurricular activities.

The stories come from a wide range of media outlets, curated and summarized by the Solutions Journalism Network. They’re a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to spreading the practice of solutions journalism, which highlights how problems are solvable and that doing better is possible. Solutions journalism empowers and energizes audiences, helping to combat negative news fatigue.

The news has always played an essential role in our lives, keeping us informed about the world and the issues we care about. These days we’re consuming more news than ever, and sometimes, it can feel like there are only problems out there. According to the 2017 Digital News Report by Reuters Institute and University of Oxford, 38% of Americans are avoiding the news, and 47% of which say it is because the news negatively affects their mood.

But the fact is, there is a plethora of “good news” happening, and we're not talking about likely animal friendships or random acts of kindness. Real people are making progress solving real issues—and hearing about those stories is a crucial part of a balanced media diet. Solutions journalists are dedicated to covering these stories but news consumers don’t know solutions journalism exists or don’t know where to get it consistently.

Tell Me Something Good is an official Google feature for the Google Assistant. It’s core engineering was built with only publicly available developer tools on the Actions on Google platform with Dialogflow and Google Cloud. Our partner Solutions Journalism Network manually curates, selects, and summarizes one solutions journalism story per day and posts to an RSS.

The feature is simple. Users who prompt their Assistant “tell me something good”, receive short punch, audio first content; a summary of a solutions journalism story, the original publisher, and a link to the article. Each summary is 10-15 seconds long. The stories reference a social problem, but are framed to highlight a response. The responses are tangible, not hypothetical. The reporting must include hard evidence of the impact of the response. The stories must have meaningful social implications.

The feature is available to the millions of Google Assistant users in the United States.

In the 6 months post-launch, we created and distributed 180 summaries of solutions journalism articles (plus links to the original stories) to 450,000 unique Google Assistant users in the US.

It generated tens of millions of impressions on social and from publications like The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The New York Times, Fox News, USA Today, FastCompany, TechCrunch, The Verge, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, Forbes, CNBC, The Hill, Business Insider, etc.

We co-developed a research study: ‘Hey Google, tell me something good’: Testing the longitudinal effects of constructive news stories using the Google Assistant. The study statistically supported our hypothesis that using the feature can mitigate the effects of negative news. The study was accepted by and presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Conference in Washington, DC.