The AI landscape moves at breakneck speed. New models, research papers, funding announcements, and product launches happen daily. As someone working in AI, staying current isn't just helpful—it's essential. But when you're heads-down building features and shipping products, it's tough to find the time to stay on top of all the latest developments.
That's exactly the challenge we faced at Portia AI. The solution? An AI agent that helps us make the most of the 5-minute stroll our team makes each afternoon to Kings Cross on their way home.
Building AI News Into a Routine
Working in AI means being subscribed to information from multiple sources. The traditional approach of manually checking news sites, Reddit, Twitter, and newsletters was tedious and time-consuming, while important developments could take time to circulate through the team.
During one of our regular work hack sessions, inspired by NotebookLM's podcast feature, I decided to tackle this problem by building an AI agent that creates daily short AI news podcasts. Here's how it works:
- Subscribes to multiple AI news sources throughout the day
- Identifies the most significant developments
- Synthesizes the information into a concise narrative
- Generates a 2-3 minute podcast episode using the fantastic Podcastfy library
- Provides curated links for deeper investigation
- Shares the podcast and links on Slack and Discord
We run the agent in the afternoon, so the podcast is available before people's evening commute. This timing allows people to easily integrate the updates into their daily routine. We've also found that the curated links are particularly valuable when there's a topic that's especially relevant to someone, allowing them to dig deeper into the details.
Getting Involved
We know that staying abreast of the latest developments is a difficulty lots of teams face, so we've made these news snippets available on our public Discord server. Come and check it out if it sounds like something that could be useful.
The code is open sourced in our agent examples repo if you're keen to see exactly how it works or build something similar for your own team. I think it’s a nice example of how Portia’s open-source agent SDK makes agents incredibly easy to build. With the agent framework handling much of the complex orchestration between services and APIs, the code ends up being not much more than:
plan_prompt = "<Task specification>"
tools = DefaultToolRegistry(config) + [PodcastTool()]
portia = Portia(tools=tools)
portia.run(plan_prompt)
Hope this helps others stay on top of the fast-moving AI world! Enjoy!
Top comments (2)
@robbie_portia - This is great! thanks for building/sharing this
awesome