How do you stay informed as an academic?
I've been immersed in the cutting edge of CS because of my field and the direction it's moving, but I'm not an academic. Triaging through research papers can feel overly burdensome, and while a lot of podcasts exist across various topics, I've sometimes wished I could just turn a research paper into a podcast or interrogate it without the risk of hallucination.
I've been playing around with two separate projects that do exactly that. The first surfaces top papers published across various journals and converts them into a podcast-like format you can listen to. The second lets you search topics or papers across journals, select the ones you care about, and literally talk to them without the risk of hallucinations. Hallucinations here take the form of incorrect chunks blended into or cut off from the larger context, not the LLM making things up wholesale like you'd almost certainly get if you just fed the paper into ChatGPT.
I've been seriously considering improving both of these and putting them under one umbrella as a free, publicly accessible service.
You all are academics thus have built processes that im sure dwarf my own so im turning to you all for advice.
Is it worth my time?