News at eleven(labs)

An auto-generated news show as a morning brief.

Earlier, I discussed how AI-generated podcasts could be a more engaging way of sharing business information.

While the podcast format is great to learn new material, it's not an ideal fit to summarize a bunch of articles. It doesn't feel natural to have two hosts yapping about a single article as if it is a discussion.

But podcasts can be a source of inspiration…

One of my regular podcasts is De Zeven by Belgian newspaper De Tijd. Every morning at seven o'clock, it discusses seven news items in seven minutes. It's a convenient way to get up to speed quickly with the events of the day.

So, what if we tried to build something like that? What if we had a system that collected relevant articles or documents you missed from Slack or Gmail and gave you a concise summary to listen to while on the road or in the gym?

I've built a rough prototype that does just that. It reads a bunch of URLs, asks OpenAI to summarize them and pushes that to Elevenlabs for text-to-speech conversion.

Here's an example of such a morning brief, which includes a product announcement by Google and a Notion blog post.

Sure, it’s rough and there is plenty of room for improvement, but the concept holds.

Audio summary feels like it has potential.

We could get a morning brief of all last-minute changes to today’s agenda. Maybe a customized market overview of last week’s new product announcements? What about a summary of the Slack messages shared overnight by our remote colleagues on the other side of the world?

Just like with the podcast example, text-to-speech feels like low-hanging fruit for innovation. It unlocks plenty of ideas.

I’m sure you can think of a few.