Daily News Briefing

Get AI-powered daily news summaries about topics you care about, delivered automatically to your vault.

Comment

Inspiration

The inspiration for Daily News Briefing came from a personal pain point: information overload. As an avid Obsidian user and knowledge worker, I found myself spending too much time manually curating news from various sources every morning. This tedious process involved opening multiple tabs, scanning headlines, and copying important information into my daily notes.

I wanted a solution that would automatically collect and summarize news on topics I care about, delivering it directly into my knowledge management system where I already spend much of my day. The vision was clear: wake up to a perfectly formatted, AI-curated news briefing waiting in my Obsidian vault, saving time while keeping me informed on my selected topics.

The rise of advanced AI models like Google's Gemini and Perplexity's Sonar presented an opportunity to create something beyond simple RSS feeds or news aggregators - a truly intelligent news assistant that could understand context, filter out noise, and present only the most relevant information in a digestible format.

What it does

Daily News Briefing transforms how Obsidian users consume news by:

  1. Automating news collection: The plugin fetches news on user-defined topics at scheduled times, creating a daily news note in your specified Obsidian folder.

  2. Providing AI-powered summarization: Using either Google's Gemini or Perplexity's Sonar API, it doesn't just aggregate links but creates intelligent summaries with key developments and analytical context.

  3. Offering multi-language support: The plugin supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian) for both interface elements and content.

  4. Creating beautifully formatted notes: Each daily briefing includes a table of contents, topic sections, and properly formatted markdown with source links.

  5. Allowing flexible configuration: Users can customize everything from news topics and update schedules to output format and API preferences.

  6. Optimizing search quality: For Google API users, the plugin employs advanced search strategies including AI-generated queries and quality filtering to ensure only substantive, relevant news appears.

A typical workflow looks like this: a user configures their topics of interest (e.g., "Technology," "Finance," "Climate Change"), sets a schedule time, and provides the necessary API keys. Each morning at the scheduled time, a beautifully formatted markdown note appears in their vault with concise summaries of the most important developments across their selected topics.

How we built it

The plugin was built as a TypeScript project following Obsidian's plugin architecture.

The technical architecture allows for:

  • Parallel processing of multiple news topics
  • Graceful error handling when API calls fail
  • Intelligent fallbacks when content quality is insufficient
  • Easy addition of new API providers in the future

Challenges we ran into

Building Daily News Briefing presented several significant challenges:

  1. API Integration Complexity: Working with multiple external APIs (Google Search, Gemini, Perplexity) required careful error handling and rate limiting. Each API has different authentication mechanisms, response formats, and limitations.

  2. News Quality Filtering: Early versions struggled with low-quality content. Simple keyword filtering wasn't effective enough, leading to the implementation of AI-based content evaluation using the Gemini API to judge news quality.

  3. Balancing Simplicity and Power: Creating an interface that was approachable for beginners while offering deep customization for power users required several UI iterations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite these challenges, there are several accomplishments I'm particularly proud of:

  1. Smart Content Filtering: The AI judge feature can evaluate news items based on relevance, substance, and quality rather than simple keyword matching.

  2. Recognition: Being featured in the Perplexity Cookbook showcased the plugin's utility and innovative approach to news consumption.

  3. Community Adoption: The plugin has been well-received by the Obsidian community, with positive feedback highlighting its time-saving capabilities.

What we learned

The development journey provided valuable lessons:

  1. User-Centered Design: Early user feedback revealed that different people have vastly different preferences for news consumption, leading to more customization options.

  2. Collaborative Development: Working with contributors like s-celles taught me the importance of maintaining clean, well-documented code that others can easily understand and extend.

What's next for Daily News Briefing

The roadmap for future development includes:

  1. Additional API Providers: Adding support for more AI providers like Claude and GPT-4 to give users more options.

By continuously improving the plugin based on user feedback and emerging AI capabilities, Daily News Briefing aims to remain an essential tool for knowledge workers who value staying informed without information overload.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates