Curio Integrates Artificial Intelligence to Create Personalized Audio Episodes

Additional Strategic Investment

The company also announces an additional strategic investment from TED head, Chris Anderson, a previous investor in Curio’s Series A funding round. Before this, Curio had raised over $15 million from investors, including EarlyBird, Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, Horizons Ventures, 500 Startups (since renamed 500 Global), and others. The amount of Anderson’s new contribution is undisclosed, but Curio states that he is a “significant investor.”

Here’s an amazing new use of AI: creating a personalized audio episode of the most interesting magazine and newspaper articles recently published. It comes from Curio, a start-up I’m proud to be an investor in. – Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) May 17, 2023

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Subscription-based Service

Founded in 2016 by former BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and London lawyer Srikant Chakravarti, Curio’s concept was to offer a subscription-based service that provides access to an organized library of journalism translated into audio. To do this, the company 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 news audio offerings from services like Pocket, where users save articles to listen to later, as Curio’s content is read by real people, not robotic-sounding AI voices.

Creating Mini Podcast Episodes

With the addition of its AI feature, Curio can now also offer personalized audio content, 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 – what is called a “hallucination.” In contrast, Curio’s AI returns nothing it “invents,” as it combines audio snippets from its entire catalog in response to user queries, creating mini podcast episodes that explore a topic through quality, verified journalism.

How Does It Work?

To start using Curio’s new AI, simply type your question or request into the provided box, as if you were interacting with an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT (Curio relies on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 model, we understand). This feature is available on both the web and Curio’s mobile apps. To create the personalized audio episode, Curio searches through over 5,000 hours of audio, but this only takes a few moments of processing from the user’s perspective. This results in a personalized audio episode that includes an introduction and two articles from Curio’s publications.

Curio is a premium subscription service priced at $24.99 per month (or $14.99/month if you pay for a year in advance). However, the AI feature is currently free. The company explains that it wants to put “Rio” in the hands of as many people as possible so it can learn. For example, it seeks to understand what length users prefer for these personalized episodes, although it currently leans towards shorter articles.

A Discovery Tool

“We don’t see AI as a curation tool,” notes Gastón Tourn, Curio’s marketing director. “We see it more as a discovery tool. We think AI allows for highlighting very interesting content and finding ways to relate to it, but curation is still human, and the voices are still human.”

The company currently has thousands of subscribers and over a million app downloads, but the addition of AI could prompt the app to gain popularity as users explore this unique use of AI. The company plans to reach 100,000 paying subscribers by the end of the year.