I've been working on a fun little side project for a while – The Morning Briefing: a personalised podcast.

I listen to a lot of tech and business news podcasts but something like Morning Brew Daily works on the US news cycle. I wanted a morning show that was ready for whenever o'clock in the morning you get up in your country.

After learning about NotebookLM, I set about wrangling a herd of LLMs, TTSs and RSS and came up with a proof-of-concept "Podcast on Demand". I can pick the virtual presenters, they discuss the latest stories from whatever topics I've subscribed to, add in a bed of music and I've got a customised podcast ready for me when I wake up.

And it all runs locally without using OpenAI or Google!

Here's a podcast from a couple of months ago: