Curio, a startup constructing a platform that turns expert journalism into professionally narrated content, is embracing AI technology to create customized audio episodes, based in your prompts. The corporate today already has a big catalog of high-quality journalism licensed from partners like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Recent York Magazine, and others, which it leveraged to coach its AI model, powered by OpenAI technologies. This permits Curio users to now ask its latest AI helper, “Rio,” an issue they wish to learn more about, then have it return a bespoke audio episode that features only fact-checked content — not AI “hallucinations.”

The corporate can be today announcing an extra strategic investment from the pinnacle of TED, Chris Anderson, a previous investor in Curio’s Series A round. Ahead of this, Curio had raised over $15 million from investors, including EarlyBird, Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, Horizons Ventures, 500 Startups, and others.

Anderson’s latest contribution amount will not be being disclosed, but Curio says he’s a “significant investor.”

Founded in 2016 by ex-BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and London lawyer Srikant Chakravarti, Curio had the concept to supply a subscription-based service that gives access to a curated library of journalism translated into audio. To accomplish that, the corporate partnered with dozens of media organizations to license their content, which is then narrated by voice actors and added to the Curio app. The experience is an improvement over the news audio offerings provided by services like Pocket, where users save articles to take heed to later, as Curio’s content is read by real people, not robotic-sounding AI voices.

With the addition of its AI feature, Curio is now in a position to curate custom audio as well, on top of its hand-picked choice of audio journalism. The corporate believes this might change into a strong use case for AI at a time when there are legitimate concerns about AI chatbots providing false information or making up facts after they don’t know how you can generate the suitable answer — something that’s called a “hallucination.” Already, we’ve seen falsehoods provided by AI chatbots when each Google and Microsoft demonstrated their latest AI search tools, as an example.

Curio’s AI, then again, won’t return anything it “makes” up, because it’s combining audio clips from across its catalog in response to users’ queries, effectively creating mini podcast episodes that mean you can explore a subject through quality, fact-checked journalism.

The corporate suggests you may use the AI feature via prompts like, “Tell me about the potential for peace in Ukraine,” “What’s the longer term of food?” “Tell me in regards to the U.S. debt ceiling,” “Tell me why Vermeer is so great,” or “I actually have 40 minutes, update me on AI.”

Nevertheless, the AI can’t return information on breaking news, because it takes time for it to translate news articles into narrated audio. However it may very well be used to explore various topics in additional detail.

“We try to create from, a technical perspective, an AI that doesn’t hallucinate,” explains Curio’s chief marketing officer, Gastón Tourn. “And the second thing that’s interesting is this concept of unlocking knowledge from journalism — from news — because while you ask questions, it actually also proposes articles from, possibly from a number of years ago, but they’re still super relevant to what’s happening right away.”

Along with the media brands mentioned above, 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 total, over 30 publications are supported. (The Recent York Times, we must always note, will not be one among them. And the corporate launched its own audio journalism app today, because it seems.)

To start with the brand new Curio AI, you’ll type your query or prompt into the box provided, as should you were interacting with an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT. (Curio relies on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 model, we understand.) This feature is accessible each on the web and in Curio’s mobile apps.

To create the personalized audio episode for you, Curio crunches through over 5,000 hours of audio, but this all takes just a number of moments of processing from the user’s perspective. This ends in a custom audio episode that features an introduction together with two articles from Curio’s publications.

Curio itself is a premium subscription service priced at $24.99 per thirty days (or $14.99/mo if paying for a yr upfront). Nevertheless, the AI feature is free to make use of, in the intervening time. The corporate says that’s since it desires to get “Rio” into the hands of as many individuals as possible, so it could learn. As an example, it’s seeking to understand what length users prefer for these personalized episodes, though right away it’s leaning toward shorter articles.

Later, Curio may add more features — like the power to share your episodes with others or get suggestions based on what other users are asking about.

“We don’t see AI as a curation tool,” notes Tourn. “We see it more as a discovery tool. We predict what AI does is unearth content that’s super interesting and finds ways to relate to it, however the curation continues to be human and the voices are still human.”

The corporate today has a customer base of 1000’s of subscribers, and a million-plus app downloads, however the AI addition may prompt the app to realize more traction as users explore this unique use case for AI. The corporate is forecasting a reach of 100,000 paid subscribers by year-end.