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Summarizing SRE/Ops Podcasts Using an LLM

· 2 min read
Hrishikesh Barua
Hrishikesh Barua
Founder @IncidentHub.cloud

Introduction​

There are plenty of good SRE/Ops related podcasts out there. I follow a few of them and listen to episodes whose titles sound interesting. The problem with podcasts is that some episodes focus on one topic, and other episodes deal with a host of topics. In between there is filler and things that are not relevant to the topic but are necessary to carry on a conversation. Spending 30-60 minutes listening to podcasts is not always a great use of time.

A while ago I decided to create a tool that summarizes podcasts for me using an LLM. If I find the summary interesting enough or there is something that I want to learn about, I go and listen to the entire episode. Such a tool might be useful to others also, so I made a website for it - https://www.srenews.info.

I encourage you to listen to the complete episodes if you find a summary interesting - they are linked from each summary page.

My personal favorites include Google's SRE Prodcast, Incidentally Reliable, and Slight Reliability.

Architecture​

The architecture is pretty simple.

Podcast Summarizer Architecture

Behind the scenes:

  • The feed checker is not automatic yet. I run it manually for now. The code runs on Cloudflare workers.
  • The checker triggers a Typescript program which fetches Youtube metadata and the transcript. I chose Typescript as Python packages are not available on Cloudflare workers as of this writing, otherwise Python is my first choice for such things.
  • The transcript is fed into OpenAI which generates a summary.
  • The summary and the metadata are used to generate a post based on a Hugo template and pushed to Git.
  • Netlify deploys the site automatically on Git push.

So far the only costs I'm incurring for this are for the domain name and OpenAI's API - and it's worth it.