Hear one, without installing anything
What it is
Rundown writes a fresh briefing every morning and reads it aloud as a conversation between two hosts who interrupt and disagree, rather than as a list of headlines read in turns. Ten subjects every day, plus a weekend guide from Thursday, plus your city's weather. A listener can also ask for a briefing on any subject at all — by typing, by dictation, or by asking Siri while driving.
Every briefing lists the reporting it was written from. The hosts are synthetic and the app says so, in the audio and on screen.
How it is built
A planner decides what a briefing should cover and how long each part runs. Retrieval reads the day's reporting. A language model writes the script as dialogue, with instructions to disagree and leave things unresolved. A performance pass marks the delivery. Two synthetic voices render it. An assembler stitches the sections with music.
Three engineering details that are unusual enough to be worth asking about:
- The briefing streams. The opening is written, voiced and playing while the middle is still being written, with music covering the seam — because nobody waits a minute and a half in a car.
- Hebrew needs vowel points before a speech model can read it. Unpointed Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous, so the Hebrew script goes through a vocalisation pass that does not exist in the English pipeline.
- Every section is cached separately, so the expensive half is shared between everyone who asks for the same subject on the same day.
Facts
- Platform
- iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 and later. Full CarPlay support, including Siri requests for a new briefing while driving.
- Languages
- English, Hebrew, Arabic, German, French, Spanish, with local editions in 28 countries. Country and language are chosen independently.
- Price
- Free to start: every daily topic, 90 minutes of listening a month and three custom briefings. Premium is $12.99 a month or $103.99 a year, with a 14-day trial.
- Sources
- Listed on every briefing — 5 on the sample above. A full transcript with its citations is in the app.
Who built it
Tzahi Bergman is a senior full-stack engineer with eighteen years of building SaaS products. He led the team that took eBay Live from prototype to a flagship live-shopping platform. Rundown is what he built next — a news briefing he actually wanted for his commute.
Available for interviews, and happy to go into any part of the pipeline in detail — the streaming, the caching, or the Hebrew vocalisation pass.
Download and assets
- Rundown on the App Store
- Screenshots and the app preview video are on the App Store listing, and press-resolution copies are available on request.
Press enquiries: tzahib@gmail.com