Building a Weekly Arabic AI News Podcast Agent

Summary

An AI agent that researches the week in AI, writes an Arabic news bulletin, records it, and emails it to me every Sunday with no one at the keyboard.

  • Output: A 3 to 4 minute Arabic audio bulletin, every Sunday at noon Cairo time
  • Coverage: 6 to 8 verified AI stories per episode
  • Runtime: Under 9 minutes end to end (first run, 11 October 2026)
  • Stack: Claude as the agent, ElevenLabs for narration, Gmail for delivery
  • Runs on: The cloud, independent of my computer

The Challenge

My clients buy AI-powered growth from me, so staying current on AI is part of the job.

  • Time cost: Following the news took hours every week.
  • Scattered sources: Company blogs, tech outlets, and YouTube channels.

I needed one verified weekly briefing in Arabic, produced without my time or my computer.

What I Built

A scheduled agent that runs in the cloud and handles five steps on its own.

1. Research

Collects the past 7 days of AI news from official company newsrooms and major outlets (Reuters, Bloomberg, The Verge, TechCrunch, MIT Technology Review, and others). It cross-checks Matt Wolfe’s weekly news video to catch any major story it missed.

2. Verification

Drops any story found only in a single aggregator. Every story needs confirmation from a primary source or a major outlet. It keeps 6 to 8 stories with exact names, numbers, and dates.

3. Writing

Writes a 450 to 600 word script in Modern Standard Arabic with full diacritics, so the voice pronounces every word correctly. It spells product names phonetically in Arabic and applies my Arabic style rules with zero tolerance.

4. Recording

Narrates the script through ElevenLabs in a calm Arabic voice, about 3 to 4 minutes long.

5. Delivery

Emails me every Sunday at noon Cairo time.

Each email includes:

  • A listen button for the episode
  • Episode length
  • Headlines of the week’s stories
  • The full script
  • A source list for every story

The AI Behind It

Claude runs the whole chain as an autonomous agent.

  • Research and fact-checking: Searches the web and confirms each story.
  • Arabic writing: Drafts the script under my style rules.
  • Connectors: Calls ElevenLabs for audio and Gmail for delivery.
  • Failure handling: Its instructions spell out every step, including what to do when a source is unreachable, because nobody watches the run.

Results

The first scheduled run, on 11 October 2026, finished end to end in under 9 minutes.

  • Full chain, no input from me: Research, script, audio, and email in one run.
  • Hours of reading, replaced: A 3 to 4 minute Arabic episode, sources attached, waiting in my inbox every Sunday.