My 8yo kid wanted to listen to news, so I'm trying an experiment: have AI generate a news podcast episode every day where stories of any seriousness are unpacked and explained to kids. Topics like wars and politics are ok, but trying to stay away from local crime. Right now it tells ~5 stories per day, but I'm still tweaking things. My kid's initial feedback was: make fewer stories and tell them more in depth. Might switch to something like 1 main story + 2-3 smaller ones. Might also change the preference for what kind of stories are told. Wanted to also add some sound effects/intro/outro music. This is still an early prototype and I make no guarantees about what content it might produce, so be careful if you want to subscribe. Curious what people think about an idea like this.

Tech info: research is done by GPT 5.6-Sol, goes through clarity review loop with Kimi K3, audio is created with Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS. Hugo for static site generation, hosted on Cloudflare (R2 for audio files).