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The World Chess Championship, live, and other ways to enjoy and learn about this game

ElevenLabs launches GenFM in its app to generate podcasts with AI | Free tools from Knight Lab to create interactive content

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Ismael Nafría & Clara Nafría
December 04, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Good morning!

Welcome to "On the Net Today". Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we bring you a handpicked selection of three valuable and interesting online resources to help you get the most out of the internet and optimize your browsing time.

Here are the three resources we've prepared for today:

  • The World Chess Championship, live, and other ways to enjoy and learn about this game

  • ElevenLabs launches GenFM in its app to generate podcasts with AI

  • Free tools from Knight Lab to create interactive content

The World Chess Championship, live, and other ways to enjoy and learn about this game

Since November 25th, the 2024 Chess World Championship has been taking place in Singapore between the current champion, the Chinese Liren Ding, and the youngest world title challenger in history, the Indian Dommaraju Gukesh, 18 years old. This is the first time in the 138-year history of this competition that the two rivals are Asian.

The matches can be followed live, or reproduced later, on the International Chess Federation (FIDE) website dedicated to the World Championship.

The World Chess Championship is sponsored by the search engine Google, which has prepared a series of interesting online experiences dedicated to chess enthusiasts. They are as follows:

  • FIDE and Google Arts & Culture have launched the digital exhibition "Beyond the Board", which allows exploring the history of chess from the 6th century to the present day.

  • GenChess is a new AI-powered experiment from Google Labs that allows reimagining and building a traditional chess game following the user’s instructions. It is based on Imagen 3, Google’s most advanced image generation model, and allows creating a unique chess set for you. (GenChess is currently only available in some markets).

  • A challenge to build a chess AI bot. FIDE and Google have launched the Efficient Chess AI Challenge, hosted by Kaggle, where participants compete on equal technical terms.

  • Test your talent against Chess Gem from Gemini. In the Gemini app, Gemini Advanced subscribers can learn chess and experience the game in a conversational way.

  • Following the World Championship matches with Gemini's commentary in "Chatting Chess", offered during the live matches.

Links:

Free tools from Knight Lab to create interactive content

The classical music critic from The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe, published an article last week titled "The Great Opera Tradition Died With Puccini" in which he argued that, a century after his death, the composer of works like "La Bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly" continued to dominate the operatic repertoire.

Woolfe's article - which you can access through this free link courtesy of On The Net Today - is filled with audio clips integrated into the text offering fragments of Puccini's works.

This is a very effective and simple way to enrich an article and make it much more interesting for the reader.

How can we integrate audio directly into an article's text without developing our own technical solution?

The Knight Lab from Northwestern University offers a free tool called SoundCite that allows precisely this, with a result identical to what can be seen in the NYT article.

This image shows three examples of audio integration with SoundCite (you can listen to these and other examples on the tool's website).

This option is different from offering audio independently, for example between paragraphs, with an integrated player or as a podcast.

In addition to SoundCite, Knight Lab offers five other very practical tools that any website can use to tell stories in more interesting ways:

  • Juxtapose: Easy-to-make frame comparisons

  • Scene: Easy-to-make VR stories

  • Storyline: Tell the story behind the numbers

  • StoryMap: Maps that tell stories

  • Timeline: Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines

Links:

ElevenLabs launches GenFM in its app to generate podcasts with AI

ElevenLabs is one of the main generative artificial intelligence companies specifically dedicated to the world of audio.

With the mission to make content universally accessible in any language and in any voice, ElevenLabs has developed AI audio models that "generate realistic, versatile, and contextually-aware speech, voices, and sound effects in 32 languages".

ElevenLabs offers a wide variety of products and services, ranging from text-to-speech transformation to voice cloning. Its technology is currently used to narrate audiobooks and news, animate video game characters, or create dynamic audio content for social networks and advertising, among other functions.

Most of its products can be tried for free, and then different rates are offered depending on the intended use.

One of ElevenLabs' most recent innovations is the launch of GenFM in its ElevenReader app. It is a service that allows automatically generating podcasts with two presenter voices from any article published on the web or from a document, e-book, or PDF uploaded by the user.

For example, this is what the GenFM service created from the "On The Net Today" edition from last Monday, November 25th, 2024 (The Best Photos of 2024 by National Geographic).

ElevenLabs launched the ElevenReader app at the beginning of 2024, available for free on iOS and Android. The app allows converting any text into audio with natural AI narration in 32 languages. The new GenFM service has just been launched in the app for Apple devices and will be available for Android in the coming weeks.

Links:

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