Fresh Trivia, Updated Daily
Most trivia apps refresh their content every few months. Sumbo refreshes the News pack every day. This page explains how the pipeline works and why we built it that way — short version: because if the answer was on the front page yesterday, it should be in your trivia game tonight.
Play today's News quiz →The promise
If a story or trend goes viral, a big movie comes out, a champion is crowned, or anything grabs the public's attention — you can expect a question about it in Sumbo within a day or two.
It is not a marketing tagline. The landing page literally renders the three most-recent question topics live from the database. If you see "This week's questions: Indy 500 · Eurovision · Cannes 2026" on the homepage, those questions are sitting in the bank waiting for you to play them.
How the pipeline works
Every 30 minutes a continuous article ranker polls Google News across Sport / Entertainment / Tech / Science (plus Movies / TV / Music / Celebrities as Entertainment sub-feeds). Each new article is scored against an editorial strategy — recognition, story-shape, source authority, significance — and articles above the threshold get a multiple-choice question + a "real story" reveal generated by the same pass.
Every generated question then runs through a mandatory fact-checker — a second AI call with live Google-search grounding that has to verify the claim against the source article and current public sources. Drafts that fail get dropped or regenerated; passes ship to the live pool within the same 30-minute tick.
Why fact-checking (still)
AI drafts are fast and cheap. They are also confidently wrong about a small but meaningful fraction of facts — a date that drifted, a name swap, a stat from training data that's now stale. Self-validating AI is famously generous about its own work; the fact-checker is a SEPARATE pass with separate grounding, deliberately set up to disagree where the source disagrees.
So Sumbo treats the drafter as a tireless first-pass writer and the grounded fact-checker as the editor of record. The day you stop being able to trust a Sumbo question is the day the freshness promise stops being worth anything.
When content retires
Some questions are evergreen: "Who won Best Picture 2026" will be true forever, so it stays in the bank. Others are time-sensitive: "this week's Billboard #1" is wrong by the time next week's chart lands. The curator can flag these as "ephemeral" at approval time, and a nightly job automatically retires ephemeral questions from gameplay 60 days after they were added.
Retired questions stay in the database for future themed archive packs — "Trivia of summer 2026" — but they stop turning up in regular rounds, so the pack never feels like it's accumulating stale fluff.
What you get as a player
Open Sumbo, pick the News pack, and the questions you play will reflect what's been in the news this month, not what was in the news last quarter. The other 16 packs (Movies & TV, Music, Sport, Geography, History, Science, and so on) stay evergreen — those rely on a deeper question bank rather than recency.
For habitual trivia players: that means there is always a reason to come back tomorrow. New questions land overnight, the pipeline drafts more, the curator ships more.
Frequently asked questions
How many new questions land per day?
Typically 5–15. The pipeline cap is 15 candidates a day across all five category buckets, and the curator approves the ones that meet the editorial bar.
Is this AI-generated trivia?
AI drafts the candidates, but a human approves every question that ships. No question reaches a player without editorial sign-off — that is the difference between "AI trivia" and trivia you can rely on at a pub quiz.
What sources does it pull from?
Wikipedia's "In the news", Wikipedia year-in-X pages, Wikipedia Topviews, Google News (Sport / Entertainment / Tech / Science sections), Google Trends daily, On This Day. All free, all public, all citable.
How fast does a story become a question?
Tier-A stories (clear "everyone's talking about it" signals — major awards, finals, viral moments) typically within 24 hours. Most others within 24–72 hours. Slower than a news app, faster than any trivia competitor.
Does it bias toward UK / US news?
There is a deliberate UK lean today because that is the primary audience, but the source mix (Wikipedia ITN especially) is international and the pack covers global sport, entertainment, and science.
What gets filtered out?
Morbid content (deaths, mass casualties), partisan politics, superseded annual events ("who won the 2025 Grammys" once the 2026 ones happen). The pack stays apolitical and avoids the kinds of stories that don't fit a trivia format.