Creating my own Research Assistant

Blog
deep-researchaiautomationapis

I use Gemini/Open AI/Perplexity every day. And since I also do some content marketing (and use Astro), I want the results in markdown. It’s one thing to learn something, it’s another to be able to go back and remember what you’ve learned and make it searchable.

So as I’ve kicked off this new blog, I’ve wondered: can I farm out my research to Gemini and have it build into my site?

Here’s the approach:

  1. Get inspired (X/news/etc.)
  2. Ask a question (with some context)
  3. Get an answer a few minutes later
  4. Learn, and move on to the next question

Here’s how this is done in practice.

  1. I used perplexity (which has a deep researcher) to tell me which AI bots do the best at deep researching. parallel.ai came up (never heard of it, no affiliation). I saw it also had the lowest prices (thanks Perplexity.ai!) and got an api key and had claude write me a thing.
  2. It built a script as well as a github action.
  3. I can now call this from anywhere:
Terminal window
curl -X POST \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/bryanwhiting/blog/actions/workflows/deep-research.yml/dispatches \
  -d '{
    "ref": "main",
    "inputs": {
      "topic": "Your research topic here",
      "slug": "optional-custom-slug",
      "tags": "tag1,tag2"
    }
  }'
  1. I can also call it in my local repo
Terminal window
#Run research on a topic
RESEARCH_TOPIC="your research topic" npm run research
  1. I built an iOS shortcut that calls that curl command. Or you can bookmake the GitHub actions url to quickly access it on mobile to manually trigger it.

Now when I’m on the internet, I can see something ineteresting, copy it, and paste it into my iOS shortcut. 5-10 min later I’ll get a detailed report on it for 10 cents.

Finish up with a notification from ntfy.sh (or discord - still playing around with this) to jump in when it’s ready.