Expat Digest.

The problem

Expats and digital nomads face a recurring information gap: important local news exists, but it's in a language they don't read fluently, scattered across outlets they don't know, and mixed with noise they can't filter.

The current workaround is brittle: search for local news sites, open multiple of them, Google Translate the headlines, struggle with political and cultural context, miss the news that actually matters (housing law changes, immigration policy shifts, transport strikes), and eventually give up — or rely on word-of-mouth from other expats who are doing the same fragile workaround in parallel.

The solution

Expat Digest replaces all of that with a single daily translated digest, personalized to location + interests and categorized into expat-relevant topics: Politics, Housing, Taxes, Transport, Safety, Immigration.

At onboarding the user provides their town and topics of interest; the AI suggests RSS feeds tuned to that combination (the user can edit, remove, or add custom sources). On daily login (or on-demand generation) the user gets a translated digest — headline + short summary + source link — categorized for quick scanning. Topic views and individual article summaries are one tap away when something matters.

How it works

Six specialized prompts run the pipeline: (1) RSS Suggester — takes location + interests, returns pre-selected feeds with titles, links, descriptions; (2) Daily Digest Maker — builds an executive-brief-style synthesis with tone and length controls; (3) Translator — handles target-language conversion with cultural context awareness; (4) Categorizer — sorts articles into the expat-relevant topic taxonomy; (5) Evaluators — automated quality checks on categorization, translation, and summary; (6) Individual Article Summarizer — on-demand deep-dive per article.

Primary model: GPT-4o-mini, chosen for the cost/latency/quality balance on summarization, translation, and classification. Anti-hallucination guardrails are baked into every prompt — target source counts, region coverage validation, format constraints, and diversification rules prevent the system from inventing news or skipping regions.

Who it's for

Primary user: expats and digital nomads living in a foreign country whose first language isn't the host country's primary language. They want to stay informed on local issues that affect their day-to-day life — immigration policy, housing rules, transport disruptions, neighbourhood safety — without subscribing to ten local outlets and Google-translating headlines one by one.

Secondary use: long-stay travellers, international students, and remote workers planning relocations who need a quick read on what's actually happening in a country before they arrive.

Why it matters

The AI-Driven News Aggregation Market is projected to grow from $2.43B in 2024 to $8.84B by 2032 at 17.62% CAGR — and the personalization wedge is open. Google News has weak expat-specific personalization, generic AI summarizers don't understand cultural context, and the expat / digital nomad population is large and growing fast.

The deeper bet is on cultural and contextual translation as a future differentiator: not just "what does this Spanish article say," but "what does this Spanish article actually mean for someone who's been here three months and doesn't know the political background." That's the moat — and it's adjacent to a category where incumbents are still optimising for local-language native readers, not the global diaspora.

At a glance

Project

Expat Digest

Built by

Aron Negyesi

One-liner

AI-powered local news aggregator that translates, summarizes, and categorizes host-country news for expats and digital nomads.