How to solve a problem
I stumbled upon Vinson Guo somewhat by accident. I don’t remember exactly, but I think his app was suggested to me by Gemini or Perplexity. I don’t remember. Anyway, Vinson is a developer based in Chengdu, China. In recent months, he’s been working on publishing SmartRSS.
Vinson with his reader app has committed himself to solving intelligently, including through the use of AI, a problem that for me is a huge one, given the sheer volume of information I consume daily. Actually, more than one, in fact.
First, the translation. I read a lot of posts in foreign languages (English, mostly, but also from other parts of Europe) and every time, whether out of speed or incompetence, I found myself forced to open the browser1 and read the translated version. Boring.
And then the summary. My feeds also include streams from newspaper sites, which I keep updated. But I don’t read everything; I couldn’t read everything. I make a significant selection. Despite everything, I like to get a general overview of interesting news items that aren’t essential to my media diet. Often, but rarely, I’d have some LLM prepare a summary for me, but it was a cumbersome and slow task. I avoided it and marked it as read.
Here, SmartRSS allows you to receive the summary or translate it directly while reading the article, without leaving the client. Furthermore, using AI2, you can create other prompts based on the article content (most important points, timeline, food for thought, questions, etc.).
Two trivial problems, if you will, solved by a developer with an idea. Bravo!
Sure, the app is still a little immature in some ways, and its design is still a bit clunky3, but it works great. And it’s been my default feed reader for about a month now. I literally couldn’t live without it.
My congratulations to the developer, and best of luck. He deserves it.
As does SmartRSS. Invest in it.