Why even bother making a podcast app?
yourcast! was born out of pure frustration.
Like many people my age, my attention span has been whittled down to mere minutes, and my interests have been massively diversified: music production, AI technology, MMA, world news, startups, film & tv. I found myself flipping through 10-15 news sites and YouTube channels every day just to stay informed and keep up with the latest happenings.
That wasn't the only issue. I wanted my news fix without being glued to my phone—at the gym, on the bus, lying in bed. A podcast seemed like the obvious solution—except every podcast I tried was either 2 hours of strangers debating stories I don't care about, generic news read by robots, or ragebait algorithms trying to keep me scrolling.
I wanted something that felt like a friend saying, "Hey, here's what happened today in the stuff you actually care about."
When I heard about the Google Cloud Run Hackathon, I knew exactly what to build.
What It Does
Pick your favorite topics — AI, startups, world news, football, or even define custom topics — and yourcast! generates a 3-5-minute AI-narrated podcast just for you.
It pulls stories from 200+ RSS feeds, deduplicates them using semantic clustering with google text-embedding-004 and an AI judge, and uses Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) to write and voice the script through collaborating AI agents.
All serverless. All automatic.
How It Works
- Data ingestion: 200+ feeds, 16,000+ articles daily
- Deduplication: AI finds near-duplicates (cosine > 0.85) and clusters them
- Multi-Agent Writing: Gemini + ADK agents handle structure, tone, and summaries in parallel
- TTS: 8 parallel workers turn text into speech within seconds
- Serverless Backend: Cloud Run + Cloud SQL + Cloud Tasks, scaling from 0 → 1000+ instances automatically
Result: a custom-curated news podcast in under two minutes.
What I Learned
- Parallelism is your best friend — fetching feeds, generating scripts, and TTS all run concurrently, reducing generation time more than 7x.
- Serverless really means zero DevOps — deploying multiple Cloud Run services took hours, not days.
- Google Cloud’s ecosystem just works — secure auth, Cloud SQL sockets, IAM, all plug-and-play.
The Takeaway
yourcast! showed me that one person can now build a production-grade, multi-agent AI app on the cloud — in weeks, not months.
I started wanting to simplify my news routine.
I ended up building a glimpse of the future of personalized media.
Now if you’ll excuse me… I have today’s episode to catch up on.
Oh, and before I go — try it yourself, for free.
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