A morning news briefing on your own topics, in your podcast app

Most news podcasts cover the stories everyone is following. A briefing your own AI makes can cover your mix instead: the club you support, the industry you work in, the city you live in, and nothing else. When nothing happened in one of them, it can say so in a sentence and move on.

This page shows how to set one up with ChatGPT and Potion, an app you add to ChatGPT that narrates text and publishes it as a podcast feed. Potion is ours. Every morning a ChatGPT scheduled task looks up what changed in your topics and writes a script. Potion narrates it and adds the episode to the feed, and your podcast app usually has it next to your other podcasts by the time you get up.

Listen to a sample episode

Open the episode's page

Who does what

The research and the writing are ChatGPT's. Potion doesn't pick the stories or check them; it reads out what ChatGPT wrote. So the instructions below ask ChatGPT for the things that make a briefing worth hearing.

The instructions

Three steps come first: add Potion to ChatGPT, ask for a first episode, and add the feed to your podcast app. The setup guide walks through them. Then paste the instructions below into the same chat. On a free ChatGPT plan the task runs in a morning window rather than at 6:30 exactly.

Copy these, then change four things: the time, the Cover line, the Length line and the feed's name. The rest reads oddly in places because it is written for a run that happens with nobody watching, not for you; the list after it says what each part is for.

What each part is for

• "Gather what has actually changed since the last run." Without it, a run can retell yesterday's big story as if it were new. A task you set up from a chat runs in that chat, so each run can see what the earlier ones covered.
• "If little has, make a shorter episode and say so." A quiet news day should be a two-minute episode, not eight minutes of filler.
• "Write it to be listened to." A script written for the ear uses shorter sentences and doesn't read out web addresses or tables.
• "Put the thing I would most want to know first." Mornings get interrupted. If you only hear the first minute, it should be the minute that mattered.
• "Authorize the narration up front." When you're in the chat, the assistant can stop to ask before spending narration time, and Potion waits for a go-ahead before narrating an article read from a link. At 6:30 nobody is there to answer, so the task gives the go-ahead in advance.
• "Check back until the episode exists." Narration runs in the background. A run that stops before it finishes leaves you nothing to hear.
• The last two paragraphs keep the task switched on. In our tests, runs switched their own task off after a good episode, even when told not to; this wording held on a paid account for eight mornings in a row. What we found.

Writing a good Cover line

A narrow topic makes a more useful briefing than a broad one. "Football" gets you the biggest football story in the world that morning; "Arsenal and the Premier League table" gets you yours. Here are some lines to start from:

• "Cover: Formula 1 news and results, and the next race weekend's schedule."
• "Cover: what changed in battery chemistry and charging, and what BYD, CATL and Tesla announced."
• "Cover: interest-rate decisions in the UK and the euro area, and anything that moves mortgage rates."
• "Cover: new papers and releases in protein design, with one sentence on why each matters."

If you trust particular outlets, say so: "Prefer the BBC, Reuters and the club's own site." You can also ask for the sources to go in the episode's description rather than being read aloud, with a line like "Put links to the sources in the episode description." Your podcast app shows the description under the episode, so you can open a story you want to read in full. We ran that line in separate daily tasks rather than in the wording above.

How long, and how much it uses

The Length line is a target, not a promise. Our test task asked for about eight minutes and got episodes from just over 4 to just over 10½ minutes, 8½ on average.

Potion counts narration in minutes of finished audio:

• Free comes with two hours of narration, once, and up to 20 episodes in one show. That is about two weeks of a daily eight-minute briefing.
• Plus ($5 a month) gives five hours every 30 days, which is ten minutes a day.
• Pro ($12 a month) gives 25 hours every 30 days, enough for a longer briefing or several shows.

The six standard voices count minute for minute. The three premium voices count five times over, so an eight-minute episode in a premium voice uses 40 minutes. When the free narration runs out, Potion emails you once, and new episodes stop until you move to a paid plan. Plans are on Potion's plans page.

When it arrives

On a paid ChatGPT plan you can set an exact time. In our test, set for 7:05, the episode was in the feed by 7:18 on each of the eight mornings it made one, so set yours a little before you usually press play. A free ChatGPT plan runs tasks in a window, such as morning, rather than at a set time.

Your podcast app checks for new episodes on its own schedule. If yours lets you download new episodes of a show automatically, turn that on for this one, and on most mornings the briefing will be on your phone before you lose signal on the way to work.

Choosing a voice

Potion has nine voices, each with a short sample you can play. Ask ChatGPT "Which voices does Potion have?" to hear them, then add a line to the task such as "Narrate it with the voice George." One narrator reads each episode; there is no two-host format. The voices have only been checked in English.

Who can hear it

The feed's address is long and random, so nobody can realistically guess it, and the feed asks podcast directories not to list it. That makes it unlisted rather than private: directories aren't obliged to honour the request, and the feed has no password, so anyone you give the address to can listen. For a news briefing that rarely matters, but keep it in mind before you add anything personal to the Cover line.

With Claude instead of ChatGPT

Claude can make the same episodes through Potion's custom connector. It has to be the custom connector: the Potion connector in Claude's directory doesn't narrate. Press Claude below for the setup. We have tested the daily, unattended version on ChatGPT only, so in Claude, plan on asking for each episode yourself until we have.