What is this?

Encouraged by friends in the Tokyo Tech community, this podcast uses AI to generate natural English summaries of Japanese tech news stories, which are then converted into human-sounding speech. The result is short, easy-to-digest English tech news updates that are directly from a Japanese source.

Simiarly, I also made a site and podcast providing general news from Japan (Japan Daily News).

Technology used

• Website: GitHub pages and the Jekyll static site generator
• Theme: LinkRot podcast theme
• Audio file hosting: Internet Archive
• News source: ITmedia RSS feeds
• English-language summaries: OpenAI API (GPT)
• Text-to-speech: ElevenLabs API – see my ElevenLabs API Python tutorial
• Programming: Good ol’ Python

The code is open source (MIT license) and hosted on GitHub. I also have a video course where I explain how to generate the audio files: ChatGPT-to-Speech: Build an AI-Powered Podcast With Python