🤖Audiobooks Narrated by AI Voices

Hey TEDchats Fam!

Happy Thursday! What if Shakespeare could narrate Hamlet—without a mic? AI is rewriting the audiobook game, and ElevenLabs is leading the charge. But can synthetic voices truly rival the magic of human storytelling?

🧑‍💻 WEEKLY PROMPT

🍕 QUICK BITES

ElevenLabs Enters the Audiobook Game

AI voice giant ElevenLabs is shaking up the audiobook industry by letting authors create and publish AI-narrated audiobooks on its ElevenReader app. Following Spotify’s recent acceptance of ElevenLabs AI-narrated audiobooks, this move signals growing industry adoption. Competing with Audible, the platform is now offering $1.10 per 11 minutes of listener engagement, making it a lucrative option for indie authors. Currently available for U.S. authors with English-language titles, ElevenLabs plans to expand to more languages and launch a marketplace. With lower production costs than traditional recordings, this could make audiobook publishing more accessible than ever (see ElevenLabs’ announcement).

Quora’s Poe Unleashes Custom AI Apps

Poe, Quora’s AI-powered platform, is stepping up its game with Poe Apps, a new feature that lets users create and share their own AI-driven web apps. Using the App Creator tool, users can simply describe the app they want, specify which AI models to use—like OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini 2.0—and let the system generate the interface and logic in JavaScript. The apps can be purely visual or run alongside Poe’s chatbot, with full access to the underlying code for manual adjustments. While currently web-only, mobile support is coming soon, along with potential monetization options for app creators (see Quora’s announcement).

Claude Levels Up: Anthropic Unveils Hybrid Reasoning AI

Anthropic has introduced Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its most advanced AI model yet, featuring hybrid reasoning for tackling complex tasks more efficiently. Unlike previous iterations, this model blends different problem-solving approaches into a single system, excelling in coding, finance, software debugging and legal analysis. It even showcases impressive agentic coding capabilities, autonomously searching and editing code, running tests, and committing changes to GitHub. In a fun internal test, Claude 3.7 outperformed its predecessor by successfully navigating an old-school Pokémon game—finally making it past Pallet Town! (see Anthropic’s announcement)

🧰 AI TOOLBOX 

🤯 MIND SPARK

Humanoids Building Humanoids? Austin-based Apptronik is partnering with Jabil to test its Apollo humanoid robot in real-world manufacturing—including on the very production lines that could one day build Apollo itself. If successful, Jabil may take on full-scale production, bringing humanoid robots closer to assembling their own kind (see Apptronik’s announcement).

Perplexity Enters the VC Game with $50M Fund: AI search startup Perplexity is reportedly launching a $50 million seed and pre-seed fund, leveraging some of its own capital to back early-stage companies. With rumoured funding of $500 million at a $9 billion valuation, Perplexity is positioning itself as more than just a search engine (read more).

OpenAI Expands Deep Research to More Users: Paying ChatGPT users now have access to OpenAI’s deep research tool, a web browsing agent that generates detailed reports. Previously exclusive to Pro subscribers, the feature is now available to Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu users—fueling competition with Google and Perplexity in the AI research space (see OpenAI’s post).

DeepSeek’s API Returns After Three-Week Hiatus: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has resumed API access after a capacity-related pause, allowing developers to once again build on its powerful reasoning model. However, server strain persists during peak hours, the company warns (read more).

Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite—Faster AI for Developers, Lower Costs: Now live in the Gemini API, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite delivers enhanced performance and cost-effective long-context processing, giving developers a faster, smarter AI that outperforms 1.5 Flash in reasoning, multimodal tasks, and factual accuracy (see Google’s announcement).

Trello’s New Inbox Aims to Tame Task Overload: Trello is adding an AI-powered Inbox to help users collect tasks from email, Slack, and even Siri. The goal? To make it easier to keep track of everything in one place without adding yet another tool to manage (see Trello’s announcement).

Alexa’s Big AI Upgrade—Will It Pay Off? At its 2025 devices event, Amazon unveiled Alexa+, its first major upgrade in nearly two years. Rolling out in the U.S. in the coming weeks, the AI-powered assistant promises smarter, more natural conversations, multi-command processing, and even autonomous actions. With a $19.99 monthly price tag (free for Prime members), will Alexa+ finally help Amazon turn a profit? (see Amazon’s announcement)

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🎨 AI ART