Sloth Digest: Slow news. Taken at your own pace.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady

What I Built

Demo

accounts.google.com

Code

aishwarya150624 / sloth-digest

app to help lazy and boring tasks

🦥 Sloth Digest

Wake up to a 2-line summary of your group chats, written by an AI that never leaves your laptop.

Export a chat (WhatsApp: Chat → More → Export chat → Without media), drop the .txt in a folder, and run one command. Sloth Digest reads only the new messages since last time and writes a digest:

## family_group (13 new messages)
TL;DR: <two short sentences>
Plans
- <dates, places>
Needs you
- [ ] <things asked of you>

Why open-source AI?

• Private: your family chats never touch a cloud API. Summarizing them with a hosted model means handing a stranger your conversations.
• Free forever: a nightly run over many chats would add up on a paid API. Locally it costs electricity.
• Offline: works without internet.
• Swappable: --model qwen2.5:7b for sharper summaries, or a small model for an old laptop.

Built for laziness

• Incremental: remembers what it…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

🛠️ How I Built It

Building Sloth Digest started with a simple idea: What if technology helped us slow down instead of constantly demanding our attention?

For the Hacktoberfest Week 3: Slow and Steady challenge, I wanted to create something that made information consumption simpler, calmer, and more intentional.

🦥 1. Designing a Slower Experience

I began by defining the core philosophy of Sloth Digest: quality over quantity.

Instead of creating another traditional news feed, I designed the experience around a single weekly issue containing meaningful stories, interesting insights, and positive developments.

The goal was to eliminate unnecessary browsing and make staying informed feel effortless.

📰 2. Structuring the Weekly Digest

Each issue follows a simple reading flow:

Weekly Snapshot → Curated Stories → Reading Progress

The weekly snapshot provides a quick overview, while curated articles encourage readers to explore topics more deeply.

A gentle progress

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

🌍 Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Because meaningful innovation should be accessible to everyone, not locked behind expensive subscriptions, proprietary systems, or closed ecosystems.

While building Sloth Digest, I wanted to explore a different relationship between technology and attention. Instead of creating another platform designed to keep people scrolling, I envisioned something that helps them consume less information but understand more.

That's where the philosophy of open innovation becomes especially meaningful.

🦥 Freedom to Build Differently

Open-source technology gives developers the freedom to experiment, customize, and improve their solutions without being entirely dependent on a single company's infrastructure.

For a project like Sloth Digest, this flexibility matters.