Mission
News shouldn’t demand your whole evening. OwlBrief exists to help busy people stay genuinely informed without doomscrolling, infinite feeds, or 50 open tabs. We focus on high-signal briefs you can trust, in a format you can actually finish.
Our goal is simple: give you just enough context to follow the story, decide what to read deeper, and get back to your life.
What we do
- Fast briefs: A handful of concise, structured summaries that capture what happened, why it matters, and what to watch next.
- Topics that make sense: A curated topic taxonomy plus light AI to keep stories grouped by themes like Elections, Courts, Energy, and Tech — not just headlines.
- Key insights, not clickbait: We highlight the few takeaways you’d tell a colleague, not a firehose of bullet points.
- Discuss with AI: Ask follow-up questions on a brief to unpack jargon, compare stories, or get more context — without leaving the page.
- Saves & lists: Keep important briefs, revisit them later, and build your own reading lane instead of chasing every notification.
How it works
- We ingest carefully chosen sources (newsrooms, analysis, explainers) through feeds and article links, with basic checks to avoid spammy or low-quality items.
- Our backend extracts the core facts and passes short snippets and metadata to trusted AI models (currently via OpenAI’s API) to generate structured briefs.
- Deterministic rules and a curated topic taxonomy decide how each brief is tagged and where it lives in OwlBrief — prioritising clarity over cleverness.
- We always show the original publisher, headline, and a direct link so you can jump to the full story whenever you want deeper reporting from the source.
OwlBrief does not train its own large language model on publisher content. We use third-party AI providers for inference only, and we store our own summaries and metadata rather than republishing full articles.
Principles
- Time-respectful by default: We’d rather give you five clear briefs you finish than fifty you don’t.
- Publisher-friendly: Publishers own their journalism. We keep summaries short, always link back, and aim to send readers to the original reporting — not replace it.
- Determinism where it matters: We lean on transparent rules and a curated taxonomy before handing decisions to AI, especially for topics and prominence.
- Safety & tone: We aim for calm, polite defaults. No outrage-bait, no shouting, no attention hacks disguised as “engagement”.
- Privacy & minimal data: We only collect what we need to run the product, improve it, and keep it secure — not to build a shadow profile of you.
- Ship, learn, refine: We ship in small steps, listen to feedback, and iterate. Expect the details of ranking, topics, and layouts to keep improving.
Roadmap
- Personalised brief slots: Let you choose when and how often OwlBrief checks in — morning catch-up, evening wrap, or just when news breaks in areas you care about.
- Sharper topic packs: More refined topic bundles (e.g., “Courts & Institutions” or “Energy & Climate”) so you can follow themes smoothly across stories.
- Better de-duplication: Smarter handling of near-identical coverage from multiple outlets so you see the story once, with the best angles.
- Mobile & PWA polish: A smoother app-like experience with reliable notifications and per-brief conversations that feel native on your phone.
- Publisher tooling (longer-term): Simple controls for publishers to understand how their stories appear on OwlBrief and request changes if needed.
We keep the roadmap intentionally small so we can focus on doing a few things extremely well.
Team
OwlBrief is built by a small, product-obsessed team that cares about news, UX, and careful use of AI. We prototype quickly, cut scope aggressively, and try to keep the feedback loop with early users as short as possible.
If you’re a heavy news reader, a journalist, or someone who cares a lot about information quality, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact
Feedback, questions, or partnership ideas? Contact us.