Imagine opening your computer in the morning. Your Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) Obsidian is filled with articles on various topics that artificial intelligence (AI) has summarized for you based on your pre-selected preferences. You sip your coffee while reading these AI-curated summaries — what a great way to start your day! This article will show you how to achieve this.
Background
Tools like Readwise Ghostreader and various browser extensions, such as Glarity, can leverage AI to automatically summarize articles. These tools significantly enhance reading efficiency, and I use them in my daily work and life. However, most of these tools currently only summarize individual articles.
Some tools can send summaries of multiple articles via email, but we still need to manually read and organize these summaries before transferring them to our knowledge base.
So, can we make the process of summarizing and reading articles smarter, more automated, and more efficient? For instance, can we have AI send the summarized content directly to our knowledge base? The answer is yes. Below, I will detail how to implement this.
Thought Process
What types of content can this workflow summarize using AI? It includes, but is not limited to, news articles, tech media, podcast episodes, and research journals, as many of these sources offer RSS subscriptions or can be converted into RSS feeds using third-party tools.
The thought process behind building a workflow from information sources to a knowledge base is as follows:
- I had already created several IFTTT Applets to save articles subscribed to in Inoreader as Markdown text.
- Obsidian stores notes in Markdown format.
- There are browser extensions that can summarize webpage content.
- IFTTT has introduced AI features.
- Hazel can move files to desired locations, such as the folder where your Obsidian vault is stored.
These elements naturally led to the creation of the AI summarization workflow described in this article.
More details can be found in the following article: