Overview:
This guide shows how anyone can create their own lightweight “AI Research Assistant” — a setup that automatically summarizes new papers, tracks breaking tech news, and answers questions about your niche using only free tools (no coding required).
What You’ll Need
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Perplexity.ai (free plan) — for up-to-date research summaries.
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Feedly (free plan) — to track new publications, blogs, or RSS feeds.
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Notion or Obsidian — to store notes and AI-generated summaries.
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IFTTT or Zapier (free tier) — to connect everything automatically.
Step-by-Step Setup
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Find Your Feeds:
Go to Feedly and follow 5–10 sources (e.g., Nature, arXiv, The Verge). -
Automate Alerts:
Use IFTTT to send new articles from your feeds straight into Notion or a Google Sheet. -
Summarize Automatically:
When a new item is added, paste the URL into Perplexity to generate a concise summary and key takeaways.
(Optional: You can use a free OpenAI-compatible bot like Poe or ChatGPT to rephrase or structure it better.) -
Organize in Notion:
Create pages by category: “AI News,” “Physics Research,” “Business Insights,” etc.
Store summaries, sources, and follow-up questions. -
Add a Personal Prompt Library:
Keep 5–10 reusable prompts such as:-
“Summarize this article in 5 bullet points.”
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“What are the practical applications of this finding?”
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“Explain this like I’m 15.”
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Bonus: Make It Interactive
If you want to take it further, use Notion AI or ChatGPT Custom Instructions to make a chatbot that answers questions using only your saved notes — turning your research notebook into a mini knowledge base.
Why It’s Useful
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Saves hours each week on research.
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Works with any topic (AI, law, medicine, startups, etc.).
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Costs $0 and requires no coding.
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You can scale it infinitely as your research grows.
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