What awaits us in the future? Discussion about LLM capabilities in NewsBlur

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Hello!
Thank you for your hard work!
Please tell me, what changes of the project are waiting for us in the future? Is there a roadmap?

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The next big features I’m planning are a new magazine view on iOS, a native Mac app, and Slack integration for notifications. I also have a discover branch that is nearly done that has a way to discover more feeds based on the ones you’re reading. There’s a lot more work to do to clean up the data, though, even thought the UI is finished. I’d love to get back to that.

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Why only iOS? and android?

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Android got the grid view first and iOS just got it recently. So I’m going backwards and doing iOS first and then extending the magazine view to Android.

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Oh and since I’m here, I’ll mention that I’ve been noodling on some tools where you can bring your own AI LLM key and NewsBlur can apply a customizable prompt to stories. It’ll be part of a new NewsBlur Premium Pro tier, where you can get access to stories, summaries, and searches from feeds you don’t subscribe to.

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I’ve been experimenting with auto-translating articles using groq/llama3.2 (it’s crazy-fast, and free for now - but google-gimini-flash costs next to nothing as well) and it works great. But I had to basically re-write the RSS feed (using node-red). Would be wonderful if I could just make per-feed prompts, like “auto-summarize articles in this feed”, “auto-translate this feed”, etc.

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Very interested to hear more about an option to BYO LLM key… is this still happening?

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I’d be interested to know what you’d like to do with a BYOLLM key? What button would you want surfaced on each story or feed?

I’m putting the finishing touches on the discover feature, which adds “Related Sites” and “Related Stories” to every feed and story.

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not op but we could use our own llm key to summarise the article.

the button would just be a “summarise” button with the other buttons (email, train, save, share).

some cool feature with ai though piggybacking off another comment could be to have weekly “feeds” of sources that post often, summarising all the posts of a source for the week. for example, if NewsCorp makes 100 posts in a week, using an llm key we could take those 100 posts and summarise the main points into one condensed article with the main points.

then we could apply that to multiple feeds (NewsCorp and MediaCo) and have one feed that provides one weekly update with both (NewsCorp and MediaCo) sources. If you want to know how this could look like, take a look at “MIT - The Download” newsletter.

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I like that. I’d also want to provide a way for you to customize the prompt. So you’d be able to choose between multiple prompts, timespans, feed/folder, and even automation for when those summarizations run. I assume they’ll be aggregated into a summary feed, but what does it look like to have more than 1 summary feed, maybe even 1 per folder. Is it an alternate view, like All/Unread/Focus/Summary, or an entire feed next to the original feed. Still gotta figure out where the summaries go.

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“””
I assume they’ll be aggregated into a summary feed, but what does it look like to have more than 1 summary feed, maybe even 1 per folder.
“””

my idea is that the summary feeds are the same as a normal feed. you could have a special favicon next to the normal favicon to differentiate between normal feeds (or just the one, custom favicon) or have their own section (like how “all site stories”, “read stories” and “all shared stories” are divided).

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Is it an alternate view, like All/Unread/Focus/Summary, or an entire feed next to the original feed. Still gotta figure out where the summaries go.
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this would work so well. you can have an alternative view where all the llm generated feeds are shown and where they’re stored.

for example, if you stored “LLM-feed-1” in the “Social” folder then when you click the “AI” view on then it will show the “Social” folder and only the “LLM-feed-1” entry in it.

i don’t know how you want to approach the article summaries that are generated by the llm, but in my mind the summary is an extension of the article so i wouldn’t give it its own view.

if you wanted to give the summaries their own view, you could include it into the “AI” view mentioned before and show the entry exactly how it displays in the other views (with the summary on top or however you decide to lay it out). in these cases it would show the normal feed (not llm generated), and in the feed it will show the articles that have llm generated summaries.

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Just to say, I would prefer no LLM capabilities added into Newsblur whatsoever and will be considering changing readers after a good decade+ or so. I might tolerate if they are under a completely separate tier, but it is unlikely.

I subscribe to people because I would like to read their words, not mangled garbage that might possibly resemble it.

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Llm summaries would be under a separate tier. You wouldn’t get them for free. In fact, the way we’ve been discussing this is if you bring your own LLM API key, then you can request summaries and you’d pay for them in raw operating costs yourself, newsblur wouldn’t charge you for it.

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I really love the sound of this, being able to fully configure the prompt and what it applies to and when would be fantastic, it’s exactly what I’m looking for. The BYO nature means its fully honest and transparent and up to the user how much they’re prepared to pay (they can configure based on their requirements and budget).

I can imagine the Discover feed would be useful to me from time to time but my situation (I’m sure I’m not alone) is that I don’t have enough time to keep up with the feeds I’m already subscribed to so I’m mainly looking for mechanisms to help me do so more efficiently - rather than adding more feeds.

For context, I have 233 feeds. Many are sporadic or near-dormant, but others publish 10+ a day.

For most of these, my goal with LLMs is not to avoid reading all the original posts entirely, but to help me quickly see which ones I want to read in full. To really optimise this I would have different strategies for different feeds/folders.

I might not be the best person to weigh in on the specifics of the UI but I can tell you what I’d ideally like to do, in case that helps:

  1. Summarise all the articles in a feed/folder individually.
    I kind of imagine this as a new “view” alongside Feed/Text/Story, so you could switch to the original easily if the summary suggests it is worth the time.
    (Ideally with the option to summarise from the main Story text, although I imagine that could be unethical, so I’ll assume that’s not on the cards)

  2. Summarise a feed overall
    Creating a summary of the feed/folder events over the last X days/whatever.
    For folders this would be particularly useful because it could give you an overview of what is happening in a particular area of interest, even if you don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty most of the time.

  3. Hide/surface articles in a feed/folder (replace Intelligence Trainer)
    For certain feeds, I’d really like to be able to replace the Intelligence Trainer with an LLM making the decision about whether to surface/hide something or not. I find the current Intelligence Trainer largely doesn’t do what I want it to.

In all these cases, being able to individually construct and iterate on the prompts used would make it incredibly powerful and personal to what I need, allowing me to maximise the time I spend actually reading the articles I’m interested in.