Shadow Tentacles

News aggregator that filters articles by keyword and reads the summaries aloud.

You follow a subject. A court case, a company, a war, a player, a piece of law. The news about it is spread across a dozen sites, buried under everything else those sites publish, and by the time you have opened the fifth tab you have forgotten what you were looking for.

Shadow Tentacles does that part for you. Name the sites, name the days, name the words. It goes out, brings back every article that matches, shortens each one to a few sentences in your language, and reads them to you while you get on with something else.

It finds what a feed would have hidden

Most news readers show you the last thirty items a site published and stop there. That is a keyhole. Shadow Tentacles also reads the index every publisher keeps so search engines can find their work, and that index lists everything, with the date of each piece.

The difference is not small. On the BBC, over the same two days, the feed offered thirty articles and the index offered more than a thousand.

Your words, not somebody’s category

Type sanction and you also get sanctions and sanctioned. Put two words together and they mean one subject rather than two loose terms. Put a minus in front of a word and it never comes back again.

Every search is a fresh question. Change a word today and yesterday’s answer does not linger in the list.

Read a summary, or listen to the lot

Each article comes back as a few sentences you can take in at a glance, with a link to the original if it is worth the click. Foreign news comes back in your language: Russian, English, German, French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese, from a source in any of them.

Or read nothing at all. Press the headphones and the whole list reads itself to you, article after article, while you drive, cook, or work. The voice runs on your own computer and asks for no account.

No account, and nobody keeping score

There is no sign up, no subscription, and nothing counting what you open. The reading, the summarizing, and the speaking all happen on your own computer, and the articles you collect stay on your own disk.

Shadow Tentacles goes to the sites you name, the way any reader does, so those sites see the visit. A site that has a search of its own is asked your keyword, because that is how it answers. Nothing else is told anything.

If you would rather hand the summarizing to a cloud service, you can, and the screen that offers it says what gets sent before you choose it.

Add any site you read

If a site publishes a feed, you can add it in one form. If it answers with data instead, you can describe it in the same form. Nothing is wired into the program, and the list of your sources is an ordinary file you can hand to a friend.

Free, open source, and yours

No price, no trial, no upsell. Shadow Tentacles is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Download it, read the source, change it if you like.