Huxe is a new, free AI-powered app that creates personalized daily audio briefings by summarizing information from a user's connected email and calendar accounts. It also generates deeper "DeepCast" audio reports and live news stations on topics chosen by the user.
The app's functionality is similar to Google's NotebookLM, as it uses conversational AI voices to present information in a podcast-style format. Users must trust Huxe with their data, and while the company states it won't use personally identifiable information to train its AI, some data may be shared with third-party partners.
The main topics covered are the Huxe app's features and functionality, its data privacy and security considerations, and the user setup and experience process.
The new wave of AI-powered technologies have almost entirely taken over the apps and digital services we use every day, from photo editors to fitness trackers. There's even a notable AI app available for podcasts too. It’s called Huxe.
At the core of Huxe is a daily brief, a sort of personal productivity podcast tailored to your tastes and requirements, generated from the sources you pick. Connect up your calendar and email account, and every morning you get a quick audio summary to get you set for the day. The idea is that a 15-minute audio podcast can replace the much longer amount of time you'd otherwise spend trying to figure out what's happening with your inbox and your schedule.
The audio emphasis of Huxe is no surprise, as the team behind the app previously worked on Google NotebookLM, a research tool that has its own podcast-style Audio Overviews feature. Huxe is similar, but it draws information from your emails and calendar entries.
There's more to Huxe as well, including audio deep dives on any topic of your choice, as well as news summaries. The app is completely free to use right now, and you can sign up through the apps for Android or iOS.
Getting Started
To start taking advantage of Huxe’s personalized audio production powers, you need to tell it a little bit about yourself. As you work through the setup process, which includes supplying an email address and your name, you'll be prompted to connect your email and calendar accounts. (Google and Outlook accounts are both supported.)
You'll also be asked to choose a few topics that you're interested in from a list, generated by what's in your inbox and on your schedule—click Edit to make changes, and Add to add interests that Huxe hasn't picked up on yet. You can specify pretty much any topic you like, and Huxe will understand what you mean.
When you get into the app proper, you are introduced to what are called livecasts, which are like radio stations for AI-generated speech content: For me, these livecasts have titles such as Big Tech Roundup, Today in AI, and Product Drops, which gives you some idea of what to expect. You can also get audio summaries about specific companies, such as Apple and Meta in my case.
Using the menu button in the top right corner, you can change your account settings and edit your interests, as well as change the voices used for the hosts of your daily brief. Via the + (plus) button in the lower right corner, you're able to generate a DeepCast (a deep dive) on the topic of your choosing, as well as your own live stations.
I tried to get the app to give me a DeepCast on the history of the band R.E.M., and it produced a relatively insightful and perfectly accurate (if a little generic) 15-minute clip in just a few seconds. As with the Audio Overviews in NotebookLM, you get two AI characters talking to each other about the subject at hand, podcast-style.
As always with any app that connects to your email and calendar, you're trusting the developer to handle your data responsibly. The full Huxe privacy policy is here, and while there's obviously a lot of data recorded—which is what makes the daily briefing and the other features work—the company says it won't use any personally identifiable email or calendar data to train its AI models. According to the privacy policy, there’s still a possibility some of your data is being shared with third-party LLM and voice synthesis partners—each of which have their privacy policies—that help Huxe make your podcasts. So take a hard look at what sorts of sensitive things are in your email inbox and your calendar before handing over permissions.
Your Daily Briefing
You can wait for Huxe to deliver a briefing every morning (you'll get a notification when it's ready), or you can generate one right away by tapping the play button in the center of the app's home screen. These briefings typically include a summary of what's in your inbox, the latest news relevant to your interests, and the next events on your calendar.
At the foot of the screen you'll see some familiar playback controls, so you can pause and restart the audio, and change the playback speed (all the way up to 3X). There are four icons along the bottom as well, which let you jump between the different parts of the daily briefing. Up at the top you can pick between the more visual Card view, or the Text view that shows a transcription of what's being said. If something catches your ear, you can interrupt and ask for more detail, and the app will respond to that request.
Huxe will pick out the actual contents of the emails that it thinks are interesting—so you might hear what your boss thought of your latest report, and what you're being asked to do next, for example. A lot of the time there's no need to dig into the emails at all after you've heard them summarized, unless you need to take action.
The news summaries are all straightforward, giving you the headlines in your specified areas of interest, and a quick rundown of what the stories are. If you've used any kind of AI news summary tool before, this will all be familiar. Based on the tech news in my feed, the app is accurate enough at distilling the key points about what's happening.
It's a promising app, and I can see it saving time for many people, but it has the same problem as every other inbox summarizer: It doesn't really know which emails are most important to me, and I'm worried it'll skip over something important, which means I have to check everything manually anyway.
That part of the app can be improved, but I've found the calendar and news summaries much more useful. There's also the question of how Huxe is going to fund all of this AI audio generation over the longer term—but for now at least, you can sign up and test it out for free.
Meridiano
