My first stupid side project- suggestions welcome!
Creating a Fun and Autonomous AI-Powered News Digest: My First Side Project
In the ever-evolving landscape of web development and artificial intelligence, experimenting with innovative projects can be both exciting and educational. Recently, I embarked on a personal side project designed primarily for entertainment and learning, without any commercial motives. Today, I’d like to share the journey, technical approach, and future ideas for this initiative, and invite feedback from the community.
Project Overview
The goal was simple: develop a lightweight, AI-driven website that provides users with a humorous, engaging five-minute news summary. This site aggregates current news stories, rewrites them with a distinctive tone, and synthesizes the content into speech. The emphasis is on fun, personality, and a bit of snark, tailored to entertain friends and myself.
Technical Approach
- Content Collection
Initially, I intended to source news via a dedicated API. However, I quickly realized that the OpenAI API—which I was planning to utilize for rewriting and narration—does not have the capability to fetch or interpret web content directly. To overcome this, I shifted to scraping top stories directly from Reddit’s r/news subreddit. This approach allows for real-time, user-generated news content, which I filter for that day and rank based on popularity to ensure relevance and interest.
- Context Enrichment
To make the AI-generated commentary feel more ‘human’ and engaging, I incorporated high-rated comments from Reddit posts. Feeding these comments into the prompt helps generate more lively, opinionated, and sometimes snarky summaries, giving the content a personalized touch.
- Automation Workflow
The entire processing pipeline runs automatically at 2 a.m. each day:
- Reddit scraping for top stories and comments
- Sending curated content to GPT-4.1 for rewriting and commentary generation, returning a structured JSON transcript
- Converting the transcript into speech via an available text-to-speech system (GPT-4 Mini TTS)
- Analyzing the speech file to determine duration, which informs caption timing and visual effects within the site’s presentation layer
Future Directions
Although this project was primarily for fun, I am contemplating turning the completed summaries into a podcast, automating the process of audio publishing. Monetization isn’t a priority at this stage; the main aim is continuous learning and experimentation.
Feedback and Suggestions
I’m eager to improve both the quality of the commentary and the user interface. If anyone has ideas on how to make the AI-generated content more
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