Using AI to create a personalised daily briefing
Because I'm tired of waiting for Apple and Google to enable this feature
One of my AI predictions for 2026 was “The personalised briefing will be a battleground for driving daily habit, with Apple and Google entering the fray”.
More specifically, I predicted “Apple and Google will launch personalised daily briefing products for iOS and Android in 2026, taking advantage of their breadth of insight into our interests and activities.”
Five months on and Apple is still focused on getting the foundations of Apple Intelligence and the new Siri right. Google, however, has been busy in this area.
At Google I/O in May, it launched Daily Brief, billed as “Your personalized overview of today’s priorities.” It’s squarely focused on productivity for those embedded in the Google ecosystem, with its data sources limited to Gmail, Google Calendar and Gemini chats. It’s currently only available to paying Google AI subscribers in the US.
A couple of weeks later, Google released Dreambeans, an experimental mobile app for iOS and Android which casts the net wider, aiming to provide “proactive, personalized collections of stories each day covering the things that matter most to you”.
It’s also currently only available to paying Google AI subscribers in the US (specifically, those on the most expensive Ultra tier).
So, I decided to create my own personalised daily briefing. OpenAI rolled out Scheduled Tasks in ChatGPT to all paying subscribers last week, with ‘Daily brief’ the top suggested use case, so I thought I’d give that a go.
Mercifully, keeping on top of my calendar and inbox hasn’t been a challenge since I left the BBC.
However, a daily personalised briefing still holds some appeal.
Top of my priority list: a daily round-up of AI and media news stories. I subscribe to a lot of AI and media newsletters, so have a pretty good sense of what I do and don’t want (AI newsletter editors: please stop with ‘guess which image is AI-generated’ quizzes. We get that it’s now basically impossible to tell).
I gave it the following brief:
It confirmed it had scheduled the briefing:
I then asked it for a sample edition:
Whilst the first and second stories are two aspects of the same story, all of the stories are on-brief and have linked sources published within the last 24 hours.
It also appears to have taken my ‘no padding’ instruction seriously (I love it when an AI assistant decides not to make things up).
Today’s briefing arrived on time this morning, with a push notification to my phone.
It was again very selective, considering just three stories worthy of inclusion. The third story was a different outlet’s write up of one of the stories from yesterday’s bulletin, suggesting I might need to add an instruction to avoid repeating stories from previous briefings.
Still, it’s a promising start and I’m hopeful I can get it to the point where it’s the first work-related briefing I turn to in the morning (before wading through the less tightly edited newsletters).
Gemini offers paying subscribers a similar capability called Scheduled actions. However, when I gave it the same instructions it came back with eight stories, none of which were from the last 24 hours.
There’s also no shortage of people trying to wrap this capability up in a dedicated interface - many apparently vibe-coded - and charging a monthly fee (e.g. PersonalBriefing, ClarityBriefs, DayStart).
Of course, most people won’t be motivated to configure their own briefings. They’ll wait until it’s a feature that shows up on their phone and just needs a tap to activate. Google is already moving in that direction and I’m confident Apple will get there eventually. Both companies know a huge amount about their users’ interests and daily routines and control the operating systems/product suites many of us use to organise our personal and professional lives. The bet is that layering generative AI on top of that knowledge and tool access will produce briefings that are sticky enough to create another reason not to leave their respective ecosystems.
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