Feeds & news

There has never been more worth reading, and never less time to find it. Subscribe to the sites, blogs and newsletters you care about and Pepper reads them for you — then hands you the few things worth your attention, in your morning brief, with enough context to know whether to open them.

You decide how much and how often. If it's too much, or not enough, say so. Anything with an RSS/Atom feed works — including podcasts, which Pepper transcribes so you can read and search them like any other feed.

What you can do

• Follow a site: "Subscribe me to Stratechery", "Follow https://example.com." You can paste a site's homepage — Pepper finds the feed automatically — or a direct feed URL.
• Unsubscribe: "Unsubscribe from the New York Times feed." You can refer to it by name or by part of the URL; if it's ambiguous, Pepper asks which one.
• See what you follow: "What feeds do I follow?" Pepper lists your subscriptions with unread counts, and flags any that have gone quiet or stopped working.
• Ask about an article: "Tell me more about that Stratechery piece", "What was that article about the Fed?", "Anything in my feeds about climate this week?" Pepper searches your feeds and summarizes, with a link to read the full piece.
• Ask for a particular day's piece: "the August 14 episode of Short Wave", "anything from Stratechery last Tuesday", "articles about the Fed published in July." Naming a date gets you that date — worth doing with a podcast especially, where the whole back catalog arrives at once and "recent" means when Pepper fetched it, not when it came out.
• Browse them yourself: the Reading chip of the Following app lists the feeds you follow, with each one's recent articles marked new when you haven't seen them, so you can skim without asking. Open it from the menu, or say "show me my feeds". You can follow a site or unfollow a feed right there. The old Feeds page on the web redirects to it.

Finding something new to read

In the Following app, For you suggests things to follow. Each suggestion card says why it's there — "Because you follow Stratechery" when it's a publication readers of one of your feeds also read, or "Popular in Technology" when it's simply well-followed. Follow one straight from its card.

Under Browse topics are the reading topics — Technology, Science, Business and a few more. Open one for a set of publications in that area. If you're just starting out and don't follow anything yet, the topics lead instead, since there's nothing yet to draw a recommendation from.

The suggestions are built from what people who use Pepper actually subscribe to, so they get better as more feeds are followed; a small pool means you'll see more "Popular in …" cards than "Because you follow …" ones for a while. Nothing about your own subscriptions is shown to anyone else.

How feeds connect to the morning brief

Your morning brief includes a short feeds: block — usually two to four of the most notable stories from feeds you follow, each with a sentence or two of context so you know what it's about without opening it. On a slow news day, the block is short or empty. Ask a follow-up ("tell me more about that one") and Pepper digs in. Items shown in the brief are marked read so tomorrow's brief moves on to what's new — but only once the brief actually reaches you. If a brief fails part-way, those stories stay unread and turn up in the next one rather than disappearing.

If you follow podcasts, the brief can also carry one podcasts: line — how many episodes you haven't finished, and how many of them are new since your last brief. It only appears on a morning when a new episode has landed since Pepper last went through your feeds. Your daily feed briefing and a "what's new?" in chat go through the same feeds, so an episode that arrived before one of those ran no longer counts as new the next morning — even if that briefing didn't happen to mention it. A backlog that hasn't changed isn't mentioned again. It's separate from feeds: because it counts what you haven't heard, not what the brief hasn't covered, and nothing about it marks an episode played.

Before you follow anything

While you follow no feeds at all, Pepper can include a couple of stories from its own catalog instead, so the block isn't simply missing on your first mornings. It says plainly that they're house picks rather than your reading, and points you at the Following app to choose your own.

Nothing is subscribed on your behalf: the Reading chip still shows an empty list, there's nothing to unsubscribe from, and the picks stop by themselves the moment you follow anything — after that the block is your feeds only, even if that's a single feed and a thinner block than the house picks were. If you'd rather have nothing until you've chosen, turn off "Suggest a few stories while I follow no feeds" in Settings and feeds stay quiet.

The daily briefing

The morning brief's feeds: block is a teaser — two to four stories. The daily briefing is the other end of it: everything unread across every feed you follow, read in one pass and written up as a few themes rather than a list of headlines, with the reporting on a story and any mailing-list discussion of it grouped together. It runs to about a ten-minute read, every story keeps its link, and once it's written those items are marked read, so the next one starts where this one stopped.

Turn it on in the Following app: at the top of the Reading chip there's a daily briefing setting where you set the time (6pm to start with) and where it should reach you — main chat, email, text, a phone call, any mix, or nothing at all, in which case it's waiting in its own thread when you go looking. It appears once you follow at least one feed. You can also just ask: "give me my feed briefing" writes one now without scheduling anything, and "turn off my daily briefing" stops it.

If you've connected Gmail, the briefing also folds in unread mailing-list and group threads, since those are the same kind of reading. If you haven't, it's built from your feeds alone and doesn't nag you about it.

Podcasts

Follow a podcast the same way you'd follow a blog — type its name, or paste its feed URL or the show's site, into the Following box and Pepper handles it automatically. Episodes are there to play as soon as Pepper finds them — you don't wait on anything to listen.

What takes longer is the reading half: behind the scenes each episode is transcribed to text so it searches like any other feed item, and that takes a few minutes per episode. So a show you followed a moment ago is playable straight away while its transcripts are still filling in. New episodes are transcribed as they're published; the existing back catalog is transcribed in the background over a longer stretch and becomes searchable as each episode lands, without flooding your morning brief with old episodes. If you check your subscriptions right after following one, Pepper will tell you how many episodes are still being transcribed.

An episode Pepper couldn't transcribe at all still plays — a failed transcript is a fact about the text, not about the audio.

Listening to them

You play them in the Podcasts chip of the Following app. Open a show's row and each recent episode has Play; the player then stays pinned to the bottom of Following while it plays, with ±30 seconds, a scrubber and speed.

• It remembers where you stopped. Close the app, come back tomorrow, and the episode picks up where you left it — on any device, since your place is saved to your account rather than to a browser. A part-played episode shows how far you got and offers Resume.
• One episode at a time. There's no "Up next" queue on the web: when an episode ends it's marked played and the player closes. You can mark one played (or unplayed) by hand if you skipped it or want it back.
• The transcript is right there. Every episode has a button that opens what was said. If Pepper hasn't transcribed that one yet, you get the publisher's show notes instead, clearly labelled as show notes rather than speech.
• Older episodes goes further back into a show's catalog, playable any time.
• Speed control runs from 0.8× to 2×, and the browser remembers your choice.

On the iPhone, the Podcasts app is still the player, with its own queue and lock-screen controls.

The audio itself comes from the publisher, exactly as it would in any other podcast app — Pepper doesn't store or re-host it, so an episode plays only while the publisher is still serving it, and following one counts as a download on their side the same way.

You can ask, too. "How many episodes haven't I listened to?" and "what am I part-way through?" are answerable in chat — Pepper can see where you got to in an episode, and says so when you ask about one. Changing it is the app's: marking an episode played, or putting one back, happens there.

Two things the app deliberately doesn't do. Following a show happens in the Following box, or just by asking — there's one place subscriptions live. And searching across episodes is something you ask Pepper, not something you scroll for: "what did they say about the Fed on Odd Lots" reaches every transcript at once, which is the whole point of having them.

Asking about an episode gets you the opening stretch, not the whole thing. A transcript
of a half-hour show runs to tens of thousands of words, and an answer is drawn from the
beginning of it — including when you ask about something said later on, so a question about
the last ten minutes can come back with nothing about them even though the episode covers it.
That's a limit on the answer rather than on the transcription: the transcribing has already
finished by then, so waiting doesn't produce more. Pepper is also explicit about which
text it's handing you — before an episode has been transcribed the only thing available is the
publisher's episode description, and Pepper says so rather than presenting show notes as the
transcript.

Good to know

• When you subscribe, you start fresh — you'll see new articles going forward, not the whole back catalog.
• Pepper checks your feeds for new posts regularly throughout the day.
• If a feed keeps failing to load, Pepper quietly stops checking it (you'll see it flagged when you list subscriptions) — but past articles from it are still searchable.
• You can still ask about an article even after it's scrolled past in the brief; Pepper can search back through what you've followed.
• Nothing is ever deleted. Once you follow a feed, everything Pepper takes in for it is kept — articles, their text, and podcast transcripts — however old it gets. Marking things read moves your place in the feed; it doesn't throw anything away, so a search still finds an article from months back.
• If an episode gets stuck transcribing, you'll be told: listing your subscriptions flags anything that's been waiting more than a day, alongside the count still in progress. Nothing is given up on — it's so you know the difference between "started ten minutes ago" and "something's wrong."

Things to try

• The newsletter you never open. The newsletter you never get to can arrive as two or three lines in your morning brief instead — say "subscribe me to" and the name of a site, newsletter or podcast you read anyway.
  Try it: "Subscribe me to "
• Ask the podcast. Podcasts you follow are transcribed, so you can ask about an episode without listening back — "what did they say about the Fed on Odd Lots?"
• One read in the evening. Everything you follow can become one ten-minute read — "give me my feed briefing" writes one now, and the Feeds app sets the time it arrives each day.
  Try it: "Give me my feed briefing"