# ⚙️ How to Build a Personal AI Research Assistant with Free Tools (No Code Needed)

**URL:** <https://onehack.st/t/how-to-build-a-personal-ai-research-assistant-with-free-tools-no-code-needed/311469>\
**Category:** Tutorials & Methods\
**Tags:** tips-tricks\
**Created:** [October 8, 2025, 9:06pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/how-to-build-a-personal-ai-research-assistant-with-free-tools-no-code-needed/311469 "2025-10-08T21:06:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Pixelvipers](https://onehack.st/user_avatar/onehack.st/pixelvipers/32/161918_2.png) [@Pixelvipers](https://onehack.st/u/Pixelvipers)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2025, 9:06pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/how-to-build-a-personal-ai-research-assistant-with-free-tools-no-code-needed/311469/1 "2025-10-08T21:06:11Z")

</div>

**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).

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#### 🧩 **What You’ll Need**

- **Perplexity.ai** (free plan) — for up-to-date research summaries.

- **Feedly** (free plan) — to track new publications, blogs, or RSS feeds.

- **Notion** or **Obsidian** — to store notes and AI-generated summaries.

- **IFTTT** or **Zapier (free tier)** — to connect everything automatically.

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#### 🔧 **Step-by-Step Setup**

1. **Find Your Feeds:**  
Go to Feedly and follow 5–10 sources (e.g., _Nature_, _arXiv_, _The Verge_).

2. **Automate Alerts:**  
Use IFTTT to send new articles from your feeds straight into Notion or a Google Sheet.

3. **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.)_

4. **Organize in Notion:**  
Create pages by category: “AI News,” “Physics Research,” “Business Insights,” etc.  
Store summaries, sources, and follow-up questions.

5. **Add a Personal Prompt Library:**  
Keep 5–10 reusable prompts such as:

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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.

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#### 🧠 **Why It’s Useful**

- Saves hours each week on research.

- Works with _any_ topic (AI, law, medicine, startups, etc.).

- Costs $0 and requires no coding.

- You can scale it infinitely as your research grows.