What is Ask News?#

Ask News is the AI chat built into your APITube dashboard. You ask about current events in plain language — no query syntax — and it answers using real articles pulled live from the APITube News API, citing each source as a link. Open Ask News from the dashboard sidebar and type a question like “Latest news about Tesla” or “What’s happening with AI regulation?” to get a grounded, sourced answer in seconds.

Under the hood, Ask News is an agent: the assistant reads your question, runs one or more News API searches to find matching articles, and writes an answer from what it found. It is a faster way to explore the same data you would otherwise query with parameters — useful for a quick read on a topic before you build the actual API request.

How does Ask News work?#

Ask News connects a large language model to the APITube News API through the same tools the APITube MCP server exposes — a news-search tool and a suggest tool that resolves names to IDs. When you send a question, the assistant turns it into a live search, reads the returned articles, and grounds every statement in them. It cites sources as markdown links pointing to each article’s original href, so you can click straight through to the publisher.

The assistant defaults to a broad title keyword search (the most reliable filter), and for questions about “latest” or “recent” news it sorts by publish time, newest first. It answers in the language of your question. If a search returns nothing, it tells you plainly and suggests rephrasing rather than inventing an answer — it is instructed to never fabricate news, sources, numbers or links. As the in-app note says, answers are AI-generated from News API results and can still be inaccurate, so treat them as a starting point and follow the cited links.

Does Ask News cost extra or use my API quota?#

No. Ask News is available to every signed-in account, and it does not consume your API request quota. The dashboard runs the underlying News API searches with a service key on your behalf, so chatting does not draw down the request credits you use for your own API calls. To keep the feature from being abused, there is a light per-user rate limit; if you send messages too quickly you get a short “too many requests” pause and can continue after a moment.

Ask News is a convenience layer over data you already have access to — it is not a separate paid add-on. If you want to verify a specific claim rather than explore a topic, that is a different tool: see how to fact-check a claim or article.

What can you do with a conversation?#

Each chat is saved to your account and given an automatic title from your first question, so you can come back to it later. Conversations are personal to you. From a conversation you can:

• Favorite a chat to pin it to the top of your history, rename it, or delete it.
• Share a conversation as a public, read-only link — anyone with the link can read it, and you can disable the link at any time to revoke access.
• Open a search in the Playground — when the assistant runs a News API search, you can jump to the dashboard Playground pre-filled with those parameters to run and tweak the real request yourself.
• Create a webhook from a search, to turn an exploratory question into an ongoing feed.

Common Questions#

Is Ask News the same as calling the News API directly?#

No. Ask News is a chat interface that calls the News API for you and summarizes the results in natural language. Calling the API directly (or through an SDK) gives you the raw JSON — every field, full control over filters, and no AI layer in between. Use Ask News to explore a topic quickly; use the API when you need structured data for an application. A good workflow is to explore in Ask News, then use Open in Playground to turn the assistant’s search into a real request you can copy.

Are the answers reliable?#

The answers are grounded in real articles and every claim links back to its source, but they are still AI-generated summaries and may contain mistakes. Always click through to the cited article to confirm anything important. If a search finds no matching articles, Ask News will say so instead of guessing — it is explicitly instructed not to invent sources or facts.

Can other people see my conversations?#

Only if you choose to share one. By default every conversation is private to your account. When you create a share link, that single conversation becomes readable by anyone who has the link (read-only, they cannot continue the chat). Disabling the link removes that access immediately.

What kinds of questions work best?#

Clear, event- or topic-focused questions work best, because they map cleanly onto a news search — for example “Summarize today’s top business headlines”, “What’s the latest on SpaceX?”, or “Recent news about AI regulation in Europe”. Ask News searches news, so questions that are not about current events (general trivia, opinions, or tasks unrelated to news) fall outside what it is built to answer.