As an engineering student, Valentín Virasoro worked part-time at a car dealership in Cordoba, Argentina. His boss at the dealership had a habit: Every day, he’d send an audio update covering the major stories in the automotive industry.
Virasoro left the job in February to pursue a career in tech. But the idea of informative audio briefs stuck with him. Sometimes, he said, he’d get another employee to forward him his ex-boss’ voice notes. By August, Virasoro and his friend and co-founder Iván Schahovskoy Hoferek created Lisa AI, an app that uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized audio news updates.
Within days of its August launch, Lisa became one of the most-downloaded news apps in the country. As of September 30, it is the No. 1 app in the News and Magazines & Newspapers categories in the Apple App Store in Argentina. It’s also one of the top 100 most downloaded apps in the country, Virasoro said. About 70% of users who have downloaded the app actively interact with it. Audio briefs have a 90% completion rate, with about 80% of users returning to the app the next day. Virasoro declined to share the total number of downloads. Journalists have told Virasoro and Schahovskoy that they’ve been using the app to keep up with news on their beats, they said.
Virasoro and Schahovskoy are both 23. Lisa — whose name is inspired by the first Apple computer — is a response to the changing news consumption habits of young people around the world, Virasoro said.
“Younger generations like [ours] are so used to consuming personalized content through an algorithm that knows my interests perfectly and is constantly recommending content,” Virasoro said. “What Iván and I saw was: There is a journalist reporting on a topic that I am super interested in, but I don’t have a tool that directly shows me the content I care about in the formats we consume, like podcasts, threads, a language model like ChatGPT or Gemini, or a scrollable feed.”
Here’s how it works: Users download the app and indicate what topics they’re interested in, and their level of interest in each topic. Lisa then continuously scans dozens of Argentinian news outlets for recent stories about those topics. The result is a 10-minute “newscast” that summarizes articles about the user’s favorite topics and attributes the facts to the corresponding news outlets or journalists. Lisa only cites free news sites and cannot access paywalled content. It can produce up to two audio briefs per day, and each one includes a chat feature that provides links to the stories cited, so users can read the original journalism themselves. Lisa’s voice is calm, and sounds AI-generated. The voice has an authentic Argentinian accent, which Virasoro and Schahovskoy developed using voice-cloning technology.
The app is free to use. There is no subscription fee or advertising on the platform. It’s available worldwide in app stores, but only uses Argentinian news sources. Lisa is run by a volunteer team of five engineers and developers, and two advisors. Virasoro said they received some funding from angel investors, which he and Schahovskoy put toward the product development. They do not take a salary.
Intellectual property law in Argentina allows for news content to be used and redistributed within reason as long as the original sources are clearly cited, but doesn’t give the public free rein to republish news articles word for word. Excerpts of up to 1,000 words may be used for educational, informational, or scientific purposes, the law says. Similar to copyright law in other countries, Argentina’s law gives the Lisa team the ability to summarize and reference news outlets’ reporting, Schahovskoy said, and it’s why Lisa generates summaries with attributions rather than republishing articles from news outlets.
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 46% of Argentine adults reported that they avoided news in 2026. Trust in news fell to 26% in 2026, down 6% from the year before. While traditional media in Argentina struggles to stay afloat amid a decline in advertising revenue, nearly one in ten people reported getting news from a chatbot. Young Argentinians are increasingly turning to creators, independent journalists, and YouTube for their news. Worldwide, about half (52%) of young adults reported that they get their news from chatbots, video platforms, and social media. Podcasts continue to be popular, with 11% of adults reporting that they have used the medium to get news.
Virasoro and Schahovskoy saw the shift in news consumers’ attention to new platforms as “a societal problem” due to the lack of editorial curation of social platforms, often surfacing fake news. Even with Lisa’s early success, Virasoro and Schahovskoy don’t have plans to monetize the app anytime soon. They said they want to keep iterating for now, but are open to helping news outlets monetize for themselves within the app down the line. So far, three news outlets have reached out asking for their websites to be included in Lisa’s reading list. They don’t see the app as a competitor to news outlets, but rather a new way to help the news industry find new audiences.
“Traditional media is losing power — even though they do super professional and deeply dedicated work to ensure the information they make available to the public is fact-checked and verified,” Schahovskoy said. “We value it immensely, and we want society to trust [media] again, and to give them a platform built around current consumption formats that reduces friction between society and verified information.”
