Briefcast is a daily audio briefing app I built to follow topics I care about without opening a dozen websites. You choose your topics and a daily briefing time, then read concise cards or listen to the important stories. You can also run research manually and browse previous briefings.
How it works
A research agent searches the web, reads sources, and uses built-in and MCP tools to collect information for each topic. The results become structured cards with summaries, source links, and relevance scores. Duplicate filtering helps avoid repeating recent stories.
FastAPI and Postgres handle users, topics, jobs, and saved briefings. The React app shows research progress as it happens. AWS Polly narrates selected cards, and a content-based audio cache avoids generating the same narration again.
Previous AWS deployment
I deployed the API and worker on ECS Fargate, with RDS for Postgres, SQS for research jobs, and S3 for audio. EventBridge triggered the scheduler, Amplify hosted the frontend, and CloudWatch collected logs. I later imported the infrastructure into Terraform.
This was a learning deployment. I retired the AWS stack on July 22, 2026 to stop its running costs. There is no live public demo; the project remains available for self-hosting, and the Terraform configuration is kept as a historical reference.