How does Apex Replicant's RSS auto-updating knowledge base work?

The problem this solves

Your content ages the moment you write it. Your protégé's knowledge doesn't unless you keep feeding it. Most experts we spoke to described the same failure mode: protégé goes live, expert keeps writing, six weeks later a client asks about a piece the expert published last Thursday, protégé has never heard of it.

You fix this by connecting the publication to the protégé. When the publication is an RSS feed (Substack, Medium, a podcast, a Ghost blog, any standard CMS), the fix is one field. Register the feed. The protégé stays current.

How it works

1. Register the feed. Paste the RSS URL into your KB settings. We validate the feed and store the URL.
2. Scheduled polling. A background scheduler polls each feed on an interval you control (hourly, daily, weekly).
3. New-item detection. Each poll, we compare current items to a hash of last-seen items. New content is queued for ingestion.
4. Automatic transcription for audio/video items. Podcast RSS feeds ingest the audio, transcribe it, and add the transcript to your KB. Same for video.
5. PII redaction. Every ingested item passes through the standard PII-removal pipeline before it reaches your KB.
6. Dedup via SHA-256. If the same piece appears in multiple feeds, we ingest it once.
7. Your protégé retrieves fresh content immediately. Vector embeddings update; next session uses them.

How to turn it on

1. Open your KB dashboard
2. Click Add RSS Feed
3. Paste your feed URL (test with Substack, Medium, Ghost, or a podcast RSS; any standard format works)
4. Pick a polling interval (default: daily)
5. Save

That's it. The next time you publish, your protégé will know about it within the polling window.

FAQ

Which RSS sources are supported? Standard RSS 2.0 and Atom. That covers Substack, Medium, Ghost, WordPress, Beehiiv, Apple Podcasts (via the RSS feed), Spotify podcasts (via RSS), YouTube channels (via YouTube's RSS endpoint), and most custom CMS platforms. If your feed doesn't work, send it to us; we've added edge cases before.

What if I publish to a platform that doesn't expose RSS? Use webhook-service to POST content at publish time, or upload manually. We're also happy to build connectors for specific platforms if a handful of experts need them.

How often does it poll? You choose: hourly, every six hours, daily, or weekly. Default is daily.

Does it work for paid / gated content? If the feed exposes the full content, yes. If the feed exposes only titles and links (most paid substacks), we ingest what's there and leave the body alone unless you supply credentials.

Does it redact PII the same way manual uploads do? Yes. Same PII detection pipeline.

Is this really patent-pending? Yes. Filed as part of our patent portfolio. The claim covers the auto-update + dedup + PII-redact pipeline as a composite system.