jmt_

smolagents News Search Tool

Prototype Gemini-powered smolagents CodeAgent with a custom news_search tool for news summarization.

Gradio chat interface showing the agent's final answer: news headlines from TechCrunch and CNBC, each followed by a three-bullet summary.

Details

Role
Student
Organisation
Hugging Face AI Agents Course
Dates
October 2026
Stack
  • Python
  • smolagents
  • Gemini
  • Gradio

Overview

In addition to the default tools from the course template (final_answer, web_search, and visit_webpage), this prototype adds a custom news_search tool:

  1. Targeted Multi-Outlet RSS Search: Collects recent articles on tech and AI companies (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) across selected outlets (e.g. The Guardian, TechCrunch, The Verge, Ars Technica, CNBC).

  2. URL Decoding & Content Extraction: Resolves Google News RSS links and uses clean web extraction (trafilatura) to filter out navigation menus, ads, and boilerplate.

  3. Resilient Fallback: Gracefully falls back to headline snippets when articles are behind strict paywalls or bot protection. Structured Synthesis: The agent analyzes the returned article text and generates a 3-bullet point summary per article.