RSS to Podcast: Turn Your Feeds into a Daily AI Show

You already curated the perfect reading list — newsletters, subreddits, blogs. The problem is finding time to read it. Converting RSS to a podcast lets you consume your backlog on runs and commutes, hands-free.

Why convert RSS to a podcast at all?

Text-to-speech apps can read one article at a time, but that's not how listening works. What you actually want is a feed: wake up, open your podcast app, and today's episodes from your own sources are just there — queued, resumable, playable on a lock screen. That requires a pipeline, not a button.

How listenwhilerunning does it

1. Fetch: every morning the pipeline pulls new items from your RSS feeds (any feed works: blogs, subreddits, Hacker News, newsletters via their RSS).
2. Rewrite: an LLM turns each article into a short two-host dialogue — question, pushback, summary — instead of a monotone readout. Short summary feeds get enriched by fetching the full article page.
3. Synthesize & publish: neural TTS renders the dialogue with two distinct voices, and everything is published to a standard, private podcast RSS feed.

Any podcast app that supports "follow by URL" (Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Overcast) subscribes to your feed once and receives new episodes forever. There's no app to install and no platform in the middle.

What it costs

The pipeline is open source and runs on Cloudflare's free tier (R2 storage with free egress). The only variable cost is LLM rewriting — typically a few cents per day for 8 episodes — and even that is optional: without an LLM key, episodes fall back to plain readout.

FAQ