news-speaker

News reader with multi-engine text-to-speech.

Usage

Normal mode - display latest news items:

./news-speaker.py

Polling mode - continuous monitoring with TTS and popup:

./news-speaker.py -p

Filter by source:

./news-speaker.py -s techmeme

Custom RSS URL or HTML page:

./news-speaker.py -u https://example.com/feed

Statistics - mean time between messages per source:

./news-speaker.py --stat

Word frequency analysis:

./news-speaker.py --word-freq

Options

• -p, --poll - polling mode, checks every 60 seconds
• -d, --debug - enable debug output
• -s, --source - filter by source name
• -u, --url - RSS URL or HTML page
• -c, --config - path to config file
• -D, --use-description - include description in display and TTS
• -w, --width - output width (default: MANWIDTH env or 110)
• --stat - show mean time statistics for all sources
• --word-freq - show word frequencies across all sources
• --no-tts - disable TTS
• --audio-active - check if audio playback is active

Features

• Multi-source RSS/Atom feed parsing
• RTL formatting - proper alignment for Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Yiddish
• TTS - Gemini 3.1 Flash (cloud) -> Piper (offline) -> gTTS fallback chain
• Popup window - shows new items on screen
• GUID-based deduplication - handles edited headlines
• HAR file support for bot-protected sources
• Global + local config merge (~/.config/news-speaker/ + local)
• Per-source exponential backoff on 429/5xx/timeout errors
• Network-aware backoff - skips penalty on general outages
• Per-source min_interval config for rate-limited sources
• Config hot-reload in polling mode
• Block words filtering (global and per-source)
• Inline status line during fetch and wait

Dependencies

pip install lxml requests gtts pydub pasimple langdetect pyyaml screeninfo python-bidi

Optional: pip install google-genai (Gemini TTS), pip install piper-tts (offline TTS)
System: playerctl (media pause/resume)