Podcast Briefing

A daily podcast summary tool that fetches new episodes from your favorite podcasts, generates a concise briefing using Claude, and converts it to audio you can listen to on the go.

How It Works

1. Fetch — Pulls RSS feeds from your configured podcasts and finds episodes published in the last 24 hours
2. Summarize — Sends episode titles and descriptions to Claude, which generates a ~15 minute conversational briefing organized by topic
3. Audio — Converts the summary to an M4A audio file using macOS text-to-speech (Zoe Premium voice)
4. Sync — Copies the audio file to iCloud Drive so you can listen on your iPhone

Setup

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a .env file with your Anthropic API key:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-api-key-here

Usage

Run manually:

source .venv/bin/activate
python3 main.py

The output files are saved to output/ and copied to iCloud Drive/Podcast Briefings/.

Scheduling

The project is designed to run daily at 5:30am PT via macOS launchd. To install the launch agent:

cp com.rohanmehta.podcast-briefing.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.rohanmehta.podcast-briefing.plist

Unlike cron, launchd will run missed jobs when your Mac wakes up.

Configuring Podcasts

Edit podcasts.json to add or remove podcasts:

{
  "name": "Podcast Name",
  "feed_url": "https://example.com/rss-feed-url"
}