If you’re like me, you pick up your phone first thing in the AM and scan your email and calendar. Next maybe you pop over to news and weather. And then back to email.

I go into autopilot mode with these early morning checks. There’s surely better ways to spend the opening hours of my day, like enjoying a mug of coffee with my handsome hubby without the phone in my hand.

A free app called Huxe may help me change my morning routine. Huxe was created by the people who rolled out the podcast feature on NotebookLM.

You hook up your email and calendar to the app, and Huxe generates a personal podcast with your email highlights, meetings overviews, weather updates and more. You can choose the AI people who tell you about your day and add on news topics and updates you want to hear about. Plus you can interrupt the podcast at any time and ask direct questions, such as “I don’t need to know about the weather today. Just give me the summary of my most important email.”

It’s annoying when people complain about a free app, but I have a wishlist of improvements:

• Let me choose whether I want a long, lazy podcast or just-the-facts-ma’am style. I grew impatient as it went over the weather several times.
• I’d like to be able to change the order of the updates, so maybe I hear the email highlights first and then get a briefing on my calendar.
• It seems to have trouble switching time zones. Several times it said that my session was coming up when I was actually in the middle of the session doing a demo.
• Sometimes it doesn’t respond to the request to “join the conversation.” Other times it eventually responds but takes forever. And sometimes it answers right away.

Here’s a quick overview to show you how it works.