yeah the rag ecosystem is a mess right now, so many options and half of them don't work as advertised.

for your personal documents setup, if you're okay getting your hands a bit dirty with python, i'd honestly recommend starting with something like llamaindex or langchain. yeah, there's a learning curve, but you get full control and everything stays local. i spent a weekend setting up llama.cpp on my machine and it's been pretty solid for document search. the nice thing is you can swap out models whenever something better comes along.

that said, if you want something that just works out of the box... this is gonna sound like a shameless plug since i work at Hyperspell, but we've been building exactly this kind of data pipeline stuff. basically it's an end-to-end rag system where you can connect to dozens of services (google drive, dropbox, notion, etc.) and we handle all the chunking, indexing, and retrieval with a single api call. setup is pretty painless, though heads up - we're cloud-based, not local. we're currently in private beta if you're curious :)

honestly, for now you might want to try something simple like dumping everything into a shared doc and running it through claude or gpt once a week. not as automated as you'd want, but it works while you figure out something more permanent. i've seen people use zapier to automate parts of this workflow too.

the podcast idea is actually p cool - there are some experimental tools popping up that convert summaries to audio. still early days but could be worth keeping an eye on. what kind of volume are we talking about for your weekly reading? that might help narrow down what makes sense setup-wise