Briefly

Briefly is an automated AI news digest that scrapes the latest tech news, summarizes each article with AI, and delivers a clean, readable digest straight to your inbox every day.

No more scrolling through a dozen tabs to keep up with tech news. Briefly does the reading for you.

Email Preview

Here’s a preview of the digest email that Briefly sends:

What It Does

Briefly pulls the latest articles from trusted tech news sources, extracts the full article text, and uses Google's Gemini API to generate a concise, fact-preserving summary of each one. Every summary includes an estimated read time and a direct link to the original article, so you can decide what's worth a deeper read all delivered as a single, well-formatted email.

How It Works

Briefly runs as a simple pipeline:

1. Fetch — Pulls the latest articles from configured RSS feeds (TechCrunch, Engadget)
2. Extract — Downloads each article's full text and filters out broken or paywalled pages
3. Summarize — Sends each article to Gemini with a tuned prompt, generating a clear, neutral summary that preserves key facts, figures, and dates
4. Compile — Combines everything into a structured, emoji-friendly digest with read time and word count per article
5. Deliver — Sends the finished digest via email

Tech Stack

Tool	Role
feedparser	Parses RSS feeds
trafilatura	Extracts clean article text from raw HTML
google-genai	Gemini API SDK for AI summarization
smtplib / email	Sends the digest via SMTP
python-dotenv	Manages secrets via environment variables
GitHub Actions	Runs the pipeline automatically, on a schedule, in the cloud

Setup

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Create a .env file with your credentials:

   GEMINI_API_KEY=your_key_here
   GMAIL_ADDRESS=your_email_here
   GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD=your_app_password_here

3. Run the digest locally:

   python src/digest_builder.py

GitHub Actions Recommendation

A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow is a strong fit for this project because it lets the digest run automatically without keeping a local machine on all the time.

Recommended setup:

• run the workflow once per day or on a custom schedule
• store secrets in GitHub repository secrets
• keep the workflow simple and fail loudly if the API or SMTP configuration is missing
• add a test step before the digest runs for better reliability