Japan Daily News
An AI-generated podcast of the latest news from Japan
Quite a few new updates recently, for example:
- Added a daily Japanese proverb. The proverb is randomly chosen from a CSV file and images are generated by Stable Diffusion. I'm also getting each one recorded as an audio file but that's taking time.
- Daily currency rates. I'm using an API to show the Japanese yen exchange rate for a handful of currencies.
- Small weather icon and max daily temperature.
Hopefully these things will make it more appealing for people living in Japan to come back to the site every day. We'll see…
Well it's been over a month and the automated podcast has been running really well. The news summaries sound very natural thanks to both ChatGPT and ElevenLabs, and so I've now added weather as well (for Tokyo). I use https://wttr.in for the weather source, which has a Python module available to it's super easy to integrate. ChatGPT then converts the data into a human-sounding daily weather forecast.
Currently the front page of Japan Daily News is a list of the episodes, but next I'd like to change that so that it shows the latest stories and weather each day.
Happy to show off my latest project: a computer-generated, AI-powered podcast of the news in Japan.
Japan Daily News is 2-minute episodes you can listen to while brushing your teeth.
It uses ChatGPT for translation & phrasing and ElevenLabs for voice.
In more detail, it uses Python to grab stories from the NHK RSS feed, gets ChatGPT to summarise them, passes that to ElevenLabs to get an audio version, uploads that to Internet Archive, then publishes a post on GitHub Pages which is pushed to the podcast XML. And somehow it works!
Thanks to @reustle and my buddies in the Tokyo Tech community for suggestions and support.
The Python script that runs it all is open source, so feel free to copy and play:
https://github.com/tagawa/JapanDailyNews
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Do you have any plans to expand this project to other countries and topics in the future?
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Hi. Thanks for asking. No, I don't have any plans for expansion at present. The ElevenLabs API can get pretty expensive – I currently pay around $40/month for daily 2-minute episodes on two websites.
I'd probably only consider expanding if I could work out a way of getting revenue and more traffic.
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