lunarfeed
Digital Radio News Broadcast
I used to anchor radio news. lunarfeed is that job, automated: a backend pipeline that scrapes space and science feeds, writes broadcast scripts with fact-checking guardrails, and reads them on air in the voice of a 1950s radio host.
Overview
Before I wrote software, I produced and anchored news radio. At SharkByte, my team built a station that reads it by itself: lunarfeed turns the day's space and science headlines into a broadcast, delivered by an AI anchor with a 1950s radio persona. I was the backend engineer, so the newsroom part was mine: the pipeline that finds the stories, writes the scripts, and gets them on air.
The station runs without anyone in the booth. It watches RSS feeds, generates scripts with guardrails that check every claim against the source article, and produces audio in a consistent anchor voice.
Key Features
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RSS Feed Aggregation
Python scripts scrape and aggregate news from NASA and other space and science RSS feeds, so the station always has fresh stories to read.
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Script Generation with Guardrails
Gemini turns articles into broadcast-ready scripts, and guardrails check each script against its source before it goes to air. I have read enough news live to know a confident wrong sentence is worse than dead air, so this was the part I refused to leave to chance.
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Character-Driven Audio Synthesis
ElevenLabs reads each script as MP3 audio, tuned until the delivery held a consistent 1950s radio anchor persona from one broadcast to the next.
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Cloud Infrastructure & Streaming
AWS stores and archives the finished audio and serves it to the front end, so listeners can stream broadcasts as soon as they are produced.
System Architecture
The backend pipeline operates as a fully automated system:
- Data Collection: Python scripts watch RSS feeds from NASA and science news sources and pull new articles and their metadata.
- Content Processing: Gemini writes broadcast-style scripts, validated against the source material for factual accuracy.
- Audio Generation: ElevenLabs converts each script to MP3 in the anchor's voice.
- Distribution: AWS handles storage, archiving, and streaming to listeners.
Impact & Recognition
lunarfeed took Third Place Overall at the MLH SharkByte Hackathon 2025.
It is also the project where my two careers met. I spent my radio years learning what makes a broadcast worth trusting, and this pipeline holds an AI anchor to that same standard: every story sourced, every script checked, every show delivered on time.