Curiositya startup that builds a platform that turn expert journalism into professionally narrated content, is embracing artificial intelligence technology to create custom Audio episodes, based on your directions. Currently, the company already has a large catalog of high-quality journalism licensed from partners such as The Wall St. Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, New York Magazine and others, which it took advantage of to train its model of AI. , powered by OpenAI technologies. This allows Curio users to now ask their new AI helper “Rio” a question they want more information on, and then have it return a custom audio episode that includes only verified content, not “hallucinations.” “by AI.

The company also announces today an additional strategic investment from TED’s director, Chris Anderson, a previous investor in the Series A round of Curio. Prior to this, Curio had raised over $15 million. of investors including Earlybird, Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, Horizons Ventures, 500 Startups and others.

The new amount of Anderson’s contribution is not disclosed, but Curio says he is a “significant investor.”

Founded in 2016 by a former BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and London barrister Srikant Chakravartithe original concept of Curio was to offer a subscription based service which provides access to a curated library of journalism translated into audio. To do so, the company has partnered with dozens of media organizations to license its content, which is then narrated by voice actors and added to the Curio app. The experience is an improvement over news audio offerings provided by services like Pocketwhere users save articles to listen to later, as Curio’s content is read by real people, not robotically sounding AI voices.

With the addition of its AI feature, Curio can now also curate custom audio, in addition to its handpicked selection of audio journalism. The company believes this could become a powerful use case for AI at a time when there are legitimate concerns about AI chatbots providing false information or making up facts when they don’t know how to generate the correct response, something called “hallucination.” We have already seen falsehoods provided by AI chatbots when both Google and Microsoft demoed its new AI search tools, for example.

Curio’s AI, on the other hand, won’t return anything you “make up” as it combines audio clips from your entire catalog in response to user queries, effectively creating mini podcast episodes that let you explore a topic. through quality. Verified journalism.

The company suggests that you could use the AI ​​feature through prompts like, “tell me about the possibility of peace in Ukraine”, “what is the future of food”, “tell me about the US debt ceiling”, it’s so cool” or “I have 40 minutes, update me on the AI”, for example.

However, the AI ​​cannot return breaking news information, as it takes time for the AI ​​to translate news articles into narrated audio. But it could be used to explore various topics in more detail.

“We are trying to create from a technical perspective, an AI that does not hallucinate,” explains Curio’s marketing director, Gastón Tourn. “And the second thing that’s interesting is this idea of ​​unlocking knowledge of journalism, of the news, because when you ask questions, it actually also brings up articles from, maybe a few years ago, but they’re still very relevant to what’s going on. . at the moment.”

In addition to the aforementioned media brands, Curio also has relationships with The Economist, FT, WIRED, Vox, Vulture, Scientific American, Fast Company, Salon, Aeon, Bloomberg Businessweek, Foreign Policy, The Cut and others, in all, Se they support more than 30 posts. (The New York Times, we should point out, is not one of them. And the company thrown out your own audio journalism app today, as it turns out).

To get started with the new Curio AI, type your question or message in the box provided, just as if you were interacting with an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. (Curio is based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 model, we get that.) This feature is available in both the Web and in Curio’s mobile apps.

To create the custom audio episode for you, Curio analyzes over 5,000 hours of audio, but all of this takes just moments of processing from the user’s perspective. This results in a custom audio episode that includes an introduction along with two articles from Curio publications.

Curio itself is a premium subscription service priced at $24.99 per month (or $14.99/month if you pay for a year up front). However, the AI ​​feature is free to use, for now. The company says that’s because it wants “Rio” to get into the hands of as many people as possible, so it can learn. For example, it’s looking to understand what length users prefer for these custom episodes, though right now it’s leaning toward shorter articles.

Later, Curio may add more features, such as the ability to share your episodes with others or get suggestions based on what other users ask.

“We don’t see AI as a healing tool,” Tourn says. “We see it more as a discovery tool. We think what AI does is discover content that’s very interesting and find ways to engage with it, but the curation is still human and the voices are still human.”

The company currently has a smaller customer base of over a thousand subscribers and over a million app downloads, but the addition of AI may see the app gain more traction as users explore this unique use case. for AI.