Respond to Your Unique Curiosity.
NewsTune is an AI reporter — an AI podcaster — that I designed and built. Its goal is not simply to read articles aloud, but to work the way a reporter would on your behalf: keep making sense of the world for individuals and organizations, follow how things progress, fill in what is missing, and then use the small pockets of time in your day, like the morning or the commute, to tell you what matters and what you actually care about. The project started in September 2025 and launched as an iOS app on the App Store in September 2026, growing along the way from a personalized podcast generator into a much more complete information system.
It began with an everyday problem that never really gets solved: the amount of information we meet every day keeps growing, while the time we have to make sense of it keeps shrinking. News, market moves, team progress, school notices, RSS feeds, podcasts, and long-tail content all arrive at once, and the updates that matter get buried. The things that are truly relevant to you are often scattered across platforms and documents, or live only on your own computer. NewsTune is built around one question: who decides what you should hear? I want the answer to be you. You define the topics you care about, the sources you trust, and how deep you want to go; it does the finding and the organizing.
The biggest change in this version is a complete answer to where the information comes from. Externally, NewsTune searches the web on its own and follows the media sites, creators, RSS feeds, and podcasts you point it to, updating on a schedule every morning, for example with the latest news on the industries and holdings you follow. Internally, through the ChatGPT plugin, the Codex plugin, and MCP, the AI on your computer can read local project progress from Git history and your internal documents, then turn "what each team shipped this week" or "what is happening at school this weekend" into an episode. It hears the outside world, and it connects to the data that belongs to you and your organization. One sentence in ChatGPT is enough to set up a series or produce the next episode.
To serve different goals, I shaped generation into two strategies built around what you are trying to do. If you want to keep up every day, a news series lets you set the topics, sources, and cadence, and it produces a new episode each morning like a briefing. If you want to learn a subject properly, a planned series takes a topic such as finance management and lays out a full course from fundamentals to advanced material; when you finish, you can add more episodes and tell it exactly what the next one should cover. That moves NewsTune from generating single episodes to building a show people can follow and grow with.
Voice and style are part of the experience too. You can build your own AI hosts with a persona, tone, and expertise, choose their voices, or record a few lines to clone your own voice and host the show yourself. Every series also has its own style: a casual, formal, or Socratic tone; a story-driven or course-like structure; brief or deep episodes; breadth versus depth; and whether to bring in counterpoints on purpose.
A finished show does not stop at listening. Each episode can be shared as a link, embedded on a web page, or published through RSS and submitted to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms. It can be turned into a video with charts, quotes, and scenes in one step, and transcripts can carry images, attachments, and links so listeners can see the material while they hear it.
For me, NewsTune is a complete project that brings together product positioning, user experience, content strategy, and system design. My work spans the brand language, interface and interaction design, the iOS app and the web app, and the Agent API and ChatGPT and Codex plugins that let outside AI tools connect to it. The promo video here also uses NewsTune's own voices: the podcast conversation in the middle was generated by the product.
Ultimately, I hope NewsTune offers more than a more convenient way to consume information. I hope it offers a different way to understand the world: no need to follow a platform's pace or keep switching attention across fragmented sources, because an AI reporter that knows you keeps telling you what matters, from your perspective, at your pace, driven by your own curiosity. Next, I want it to reach deeper into the working context of individuals and teams, moving from organizing information for you to continuously understanding it for you.
