| name | podcastfy-clawdbot |
| description | Generate an AI podcast (MP3) from one or more URLs using the open-source Podcastfy project. Use when the user says “make a podcast from this URL/article/video/PDF”, “turn this webpage into a podcast”, or wants an MP3 conversation-style summary from links. Uses Gemini for transcript generation via GEMINI_API_KEY and Edge TTS for free voice. |
Podcastfy (Clawdbot)
Generate a podcast-style audio conversation (MP3) from a URL (or multiple URLs) using podcastfy.
This skill provides a wrapper script that:
- creates/uses a local venv (
{baseDir}/.venv)
- installs/updates
podcastfy
- runs Podcastfy with Gemini for transcript generation and Edge for TTS
One-time setup
- Ensure
ffmpeg is installed on the host.
Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y ffmpeg
- Provide a Gemini API key:
Set env var GEMINI_API_KEY (recommended), or create a project .env and export it before running.
Example keys file: {baseDir}/references/env.example
Quick start
Generate an MP3 from a single URL:
cd {baseDir}
export GEMINI_API_KEY="..."
./scripts/podcastfy_generate.py --url "https://example.com/article"
Multiple URLs:
cd {baseDir}
./scripts/podcastfy_generate.py --url "https://a" --url "https://b"
Long-form:
cd {baseDir}
./scripts/podcastfy_generate.py --url "https://example.com/long" --longform
Output
The script writes outputs under:
{baseDir}/output/audio/ (MP3){baseDir}/output/transcripts/ (transcript)
Podcastfy prints the final MP3 path on success.
Optional tuning
PODCASTFY_LLM_MODEL (default: gemini-1.5-flash)PODCASTFY_EDGE_VOICE_Q (default: en-US-JennyNeural)PODCASTFY_EDGE_VOICE_A (default: en-US-EricNeural)
Automation / reliability tips (important)
Prefer RSS feeds over browser automation for cron jobs
In isolated cron jobs, avoid relying on a system browser (Chrome/Chromium) or extra Python deps (e.g. bs4).
For TechCrunch categories, prefer the RSS feed:
This reduces breakage from:
- “No supported browser found …”
- missing site parsing dependencies in the cron runtime
Validate MP3 output (avoid 0-second audio)
We observed podcastfy can occasionally produce an MP3 that is effectively empty/truncated (e.g., a ~261-byte file), which shows up as 0s in Telegram.
This wrapper now validates MP3 output and will automatically fall back to edge-tts synthesis from the latest transcript when the MP3 is invalid.
Safety / workflow
- Prefer “draft-first”: tell the user what will be generated (language/length) before running.
- Never paste API keys into chat logs.
