GentleBrief: Anti-Doomscroll Daily Audio Digests Powered by Open-Weight AI

A developer built GentleBrief, an open-source Next.js app that turns curated news feeds into calm audio digests. The pipeline uses Browserbase headless cloud browsers to extract article content, open-weight Meta Llama 3 and Google Gemma models served through Groq to strip hype and distill three grounded facts, and ElevenLabs conversational voice profiles to narrate the result. The app also tracks anti-doomscroll metrics such as filtered headlines and screen time saved.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week3-2026-10-19 What I Built Modern web browsing often feels like cognitive overload. Checking the morning news across Hacker News, tech blogs, and research hubs frequently pulls readers into endless doomscrolling—fighting clickbait headlines, sensationalist takes, cookie banners, tracking scripts, and algorithmic rage-bait. GentleBrief acts as a mindful anti-doomscroll barrier. Instead of opening 40 tabs and exhausting your mental bandwidth before breakfast, GentleBrief automates the morning check-in: 1. You pick the desks that matter to you or drop in any public blog/RSS link . 2. It quietly sends a cloud browser to extract the articles behind the scenes. 3. An open-weight model strips away the hysteria, point tallies, and clickbait, distilling the developments into three calm, grounded facts. 4. It narrates the digest into a conversational, ambient audio briefing that you can listen to hands-free while getting ready, walking, or drinking your morning coffee. It lets developers and knowledge workers be intentionally "lazy" about consuming information—staying fully informed without ever getting sucked into a screen. Demo - Live Application: gentle-brief.onrender.com https://gentle-brief.onrender.com - Features in action: - Automated cloud extraction bypassing tracking scripts and popups. - Custom calm-pacing voice narration with soothing ambient soundscapes. - Per-user client-side isolated playback history. - Live anti-doomscroll metrics highlighting filtered headlines and minutes of screen time saved. Code Gentle Brief Gentle Brief is a Next.js app for turning a curated set of sources into a polished daily brief. It reads the latest input from selected feeds, distills the signal, and presents a readable summary with pacing and voice controls. What it does - Selects and combines topic sources from built-in and custom URLs - Brews a short digest from those sources - Supports a pacing menu and voice ambience settings - Keeps a history of generated digests for replay - Uses a browser-based or live pipeline depending on configuration Tech stack - Next.js 16 - React 19 - TypeScript - Tailwind CSS - Sonner for toast notifications Getting started 1. Install dependencies: 2. Start the development server: 3. Open the app in your browser: Available scripts Project notes This project is a front-end digest dashboard with a generated brief workflow. The main app… Built with: - Framework: Next.js App Router, TypeScript - Styling & UI: Tailwind CSS, Radix UI, shadcn/ui - Cloud Scraping: Browserbase SDK - Inference Engine: Groq API running open-weight Meta Llama 3 / Google Gemma - Audio Synthesis: ElevenLabs Conversational Voice API How I Built It The pipeline is built around an open-weight inference architecture orchestrated through Next.js: 1. Headless Extraction Browserbase : Rather than fragile client fetches that fail against bot walls and modern SPAs, GentleBrief spins up headless cloud browser sessions via Browserbase. It navigates to configured desks e.g., Hacker News, Indie Hackers, AP News, Phys.org and scrapes strictly semantic article content, intentionally discarding navbars, paywall banners, and ad clutter. 2. Open-Weight Distillation Llama 3 / Gemma on Groq : The raw scrape payload is routed to open-weight LLMs via Groq. The system prompt is fine-tuned to function as a stoic, mindful editor. It is explicitly instructed to eliminate hype, ignore upvote/comment counts, reject fear-mongering framing, and synthesize the day's core signals into peaceful, clear sentences formatted for vocal narration. 3. Ambient Voice Narration ElevenLabs : The distilled script is sent to the ElevenLabs API using voice profiles like Charlotte soft, gentle or Adam calm, conversational . The generated audio stream is fed to the dashboard player with custom scrubbing, speed controls, and optional ambient sound layers. Why Does Open Innovation Matter? Open-source and open-weight AI like Llama 3 and Gemma are essential for personal software like GentleBrief. Information filtering is inherently subjective. When news curation is locked behind closed, proprietary platforms, users are held hostage by engagement algorithms designed to provoke anxiety and maximize screen time. Open models give developers full control over the editorial ethos: we can inspect the prompts, enforce complete neutrality, self-host or change inference providers at will, and guarantee that our tools serve human mental well-being rather than advertising metrics. Open innovation makes calm technology accessible without closed-ecosystem gatekeeping. The Lazy Payoff GentleBrief replaced a fragmented morning habit: - Before: 30–45 minutes bouncing across Hacker News, Twitter, and tech sites, leaving multiple tabs open and feeling mentally scattered before work. - With GentleBrief: 0 minutes of doomscrolling. Clicking Brew Digest runs the cloud pipeline in seconds, producing a 60-to-90-second audio recap with three clear bullet points. - Estimated impact: Saves roughly ~25 minutes of screen fatigue every single morning. Prize Categories - Best Use of ElevenLabs: Dynamic voice synthesis generating tranquil, ambient audio dispatches. - Best Use of Browserbase: Headless cloud browsing automating the extraction of public news feeds and custom URLs without ads or tracking.