Any friend of Siri is a friend of mine. And Trapit is practically a relative! Startup Trapit is launching a beta version of its new “Pandora for News” service aimed at leveraging the same Siri Personal Assistant AI engine to bring relevant stories to you. The Siri engine is based on the largest AI project in U.S. history, CALO, which was funded by DARPA, a defense agency.

Using keywords or URLs, you can create a content “Trap” that will pull relevant news stories from 50,000 sources that are apparently free of spammers, link baiters, and content farmers. And, like any good recommendation system, the more you use (i.e. scan, click through, read full articles and share) the more the engine learns and the better the recommendations get. The engine also gets human by scanning news links in social networks which, presumably, have been selected and added by humans. If you don’t feel like creating your own Traps, you can scan other trending Traps.

Of course, the fine people at Trapit are no dummies and have definitely leveraged the visually appealing, blurb-box stylings of popular iPad apps that also seek to bring you the news. Think Flipboard and Pulse here. But with the added cool of recommendations and AI smarts. Of course, as I am a firm believer in relevance based browsing, I am definitely excited to give Trapit a thorough once over. Check it out and see if it solves a content firehose problem for you.