AI may be slowly making its way into the newsroom, as outlets like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, CNET and others have experimented with the format. But while most respected journalists condemn this use case, there are a number of startups that believe AI can improve the news experience – at least on the consumer side. The latest addition is Rio, an “AI news anchor” designed to help readers connect with the stories and topics that interest them most from trusted sources.
The new app comes from the same team as AI-powered audio journalism startup Curio and was first introduced at the South by Southwest festival in Austin last month. It has funding from Khosla Ventures and the head of TED, Chris Anderson, who also supported Curio. (The startup says the round is ongoing and therefore cannot disclose the amount.)
While Curio itself was founded in 2016 by former BBC strategist Govind Balakrishnan and London lawyer Srikant Chakravarti, Rio is a new initiative that will expand the use of Curio’s AI technology.
Initially developed as a feature in the Curio app, Rio scans headlines from trusted newspapers and magazines like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Washington Post and others and then curates that content into a daily news briefing for you to either read or can read or listen.
Additionally, the team says Rio will prevent users from falling into an echo chamber by looking for news that expands their understanding of topics and encourages them to delve deeper.
Photo credit: Curio/Rio
In testing, Rio prepared a daily briefing that was presented in a kind of story-like interface with graphics and links to news articles that you could tap at the bottom of the screen to narrate the article in an AI voice. (To be clear, these were full articles, not AI summaries). You scroll through headlines the same way you would tap through a story on a social media app like Instagram.
According to Curio, Rio’s AI technology will not fabricate information and will only reference content from its trusted publishing partners. Rio will not use publisher content to train an LLM (large language model) without “explicit consent,” it says.
Photo credit: Curio/Rio
Beyond the briefing, you can also interact with Rio through an AI chatbot interface and ask questions on other topics of interest. Suggested topics – such as “TikTok ban” or “Ukraine war” – appear as small pills above the text input field. We found that the AI was a little slow to respond at times, but otherwise performed as expected.
If you’d like to learn more, Rio also offers to create an audio episode to answer your questions.
Co-founder Balakrishnan said that Curio users have asked Rio over 20,000 questions since it was introduced as a feature in Curio last May, which is why the company decided to spin the technology off into its own app.
“AI makes us all wonder what is true and what is not. You can search AI websites for quick answers, but trusting them blindly is a gamble,” Chakravarti noted in a statement released to mark Rio’s debut at SXSW. “Reliable knowledge is hard to come by. Only a lucky few get access to fact-checked, verified information. Rio guides you through the news, turning everyday headlines into knowledge from trusted sources. Reading the news with Rio makes you feel fulfilled instead of depressed,” he added.
It’s hard to say whether Rio is persistent enough to push for its standalone product, but it’s easy to imagine such an interface eventually coming to larger news aggregators like Google News or Apple News, or even to individual publishers’ websites. In the meantime, Curio will continue to focus on audio messaging.
Curio isn’t the only startup relying on AI to improve the news reading experience. Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, funded with $4.4 million. Another AI-powered news app, Bulletin, was also launched to combat clickbait and offer news summaries. Artifact had also used AI before moving to TechCrunch parent company Yahoo.
Rio is currently in Early Access, meaning you need an invite to gain access. Otherwise, you can join the app waitlist at rionews.ai. The company told us it plans to take it public later this summer. (As a reward for reading to the end, five of you can use my own invite link to get in.)