Morning briefing podcast: generate daily summaries with Gemini AI, weather, and calendar

What it does

Instead of manually checking separate apps for your calendar, weather, and news each morning, this workflow consolidates the most important information into a single, convenient audio briefing. The "Good Morning Podcast" is designed to be a 3-minute summary of your day ahead, delivered directly to you. It's multi-lingual and customizable, allowing you to start your day informed and efficiently.

How it works

The workflow executes in three parallel branches before merging the data to generate the final audio file.

1. Weather Summary: It starts by taking a user-provided city and fetching the current 15-hour forecast from the OpenWeatherMap. It formats this information into a concise weather report.
2. Calendar Summary: It securely connects to your Google Calendar to retrieve all of today's scheduled meetings and events. It then formats the schedule into a clear, readable summary.
3. News Summary: It connects to the NewsAPI to perform two tasks: it fetches the top general headlines and also searches for articles based on user-defined keywords (e.g., "AI", "automation", "space exploration"). The collected headlines are then summarized using a Google Gemini node to create a brief news digest.
4. Audio Generation and Delivery: All three text summaries (weather, calendar, and news) are merged into a single script. The workflow uses Google's Text-to-Speech (TTS) to generate the raw multi-speaker audio. A dedicated FFmpeg node then processes and converts this audio into the final MP3 format. The completed podcast is then sent directly to you via a Telegram Bot.

Setup Instructions

To get this workflow running, you will need to configure credentials for each of the external services and set your initial parameters.

⚠️ Important Prerequisite Install FFmpeg: The workflow requires the FFmpeg software package to be installed on the machine running your n8n instance (local or server). Please ensure it is installed and accessible in your system's PATH before running this workflow.

Required Credentials

1. OpenWeatherMap:
   • Sign up for a free account at OpenWeatherMap and get your API key.
   • Add the API key to your n8n OpenWeatherMap credentials.
2. Google Calendar & Google AI (Gemini/TTS):
   • You will need Google OAuth2 credentials for the Google Calendar node.
   • You will also need credentials for the Google AI services (Gemini and Text-to-Speech). Follow the n8n documentation to create and add these credentials.
3. NewsAPI:
   • Get a free API key from NewsAPI.org.
   • Add the API key to your n8n NewsAPI credentials.
4. Telegram:
   • Create a new bot by talking to the BotFather in your Telegram app.
   • Copy the Bot Token it provides and add it to your n8n Telegram credentials.
   • Send a message to your new bot and get your Chat ID from the Telegram Trigger node or another method. You will need this for the Telegram send node.

Workflow Inputs

In the first node (or when you run the workflow manually), you must provide the following initial data:

• name: Your first name for a personalized greeting.
• city: The city for your local weather forecast (e.g., "Amsterdam").
• language: The language for the entire podcast output (e.g., "en-US", "nl-NL", "fa-IR").
• news_keywords: A comma-separated list of topics you are interested in for the news summary (e.g., "n8n,AI,technology").

How to Adapt the Template

This workflow is highly customizable. Here are several ways you can adapt it to fit your needs:

Triggers

• Automate It: The default trigger is manual. Change it to a Schedule Trigger to have your podcast automatically generated and sent to you at the same time every morning (e.g., 7:00 AM).

Content Sources

• Weather: In the "User Weather Map" node, you can change the forecast type or switch the units from metric to imperial.
• Calendar: In the "Get Today Meetings" node, you can select a different calendar from your Google account (e.g., a shared work calendar instead of your personal one).
• News:
  • In the "Get Headlines From News Sources" node, change the country or category to get different top headlines.
  • In the "Get Links From Keywords" node, update your keywords to track different topics.
  • In the "Aggregate Headlines" (Gemini) node, you can modify the prompt to change the tone or length of the AI-generated news summary.

Audio Generation

• Voice & Language: The language is a starting parameter, but you can go deeper into the Google TTS nodes (Generate Virtual Parts, etc.) to select specific voices, genders, and speaking rates to create a unique podcast host style.
• Scripting: Modify the Set and Merge nodes that construct the final script. You can easily change the greeting, the transition phrases between sections, or the sign-off message.

Delivery

• Platform: Don't use Telegram? Swap the Telegram node for a Slack node, Discord node, or even an Email node to send the MP3 file to your preferred platform.
• Message: Customize the text message that is sent along with the audio file in the final node.