Microsoft Ai Roundup

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A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching the archive of Merill's Weekly Microsoft AI Roundup — a curated weekly Substack newsletter by Merill Fernando (with Joshua Fernando) covering Microsoft AI: Copilot, GitHub, Azure AI, M365 AI integrations, and the surrounding ecosystem.

Ask natural-language questions like "When did Copilot get feature X?", "What did the roundup say about Build?", or "Which GitHub projects has it highlighted?" and get sourced answers with issue numbers, dates, and links.

Sister project to entra-news-mcp.

Quick Start

No installation, no API keys, no configuration required:

npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

On first run the server downloads a pre-built search index (SQLite database) from this repo's GitHub Releases and caches it locally. It checks for an updated index at most once every 7 days.

Requires Node.js 22 or later — the server uses Node's built-in node:sqlite module (no native dependencies). Node 20 will not work.

Client Configuration

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "microsoft-ai-roundup": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add microsoft-ai-roundup -- npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

Cursor / VS Code / Copilot Studio

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "microsoft-ai-roundup": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Optional: semantic search

Keyword search works with zero configuration. For semantic (meaning-based) search, add an OpenAI API key:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "microsoft-ai-roundup": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp"],
      "env": { "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..." }
    }
  }
}

Without a key the server degrades gracefully to keyword-only search.

Tools

Tool	Description
search_microsoft_ai_roundup	Search the full archive with natural language or keywords. Hybrid semantic + keyword search; returns sourced excerpts with issue number, date, and URL. Args: query (required), limit (default 10, max 50), mode (hybrid | semantic | keyword).
get_issue	Retrieve the full content of an issue by issue_number or date (YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM), with section headings preserved.
list_issues	Browse the archive with optional year/month filtering and pagination.
find_tool_mentions	Find community tools, GitHub projects, and Microsoft AI products/features mentioned across issues, with surrounding context. Optional query filter.

Example queries

• "Search the Microsoft AI roundup for Copilot Studio agent announcements"
• "Get issue #4 of the Microsoft AI roundup"
• "List all roundup issues from May 2026"
• "What GitHub projects has the Microsoft AI roundup mentioned?"

How It Works

Substack API (https://msai.ms/api/v1/posts)
     │
     ▼
TypeScript ingestion script (scripts/ingest.ts)
     │  weekly GitHub Action — Tuesdays 09:00 UTC
     ▼
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small embeddings (1536 dims)
     │
     ▼
SQLite via node:sqlite (Node 22 built-in — no native deps)
     │
     ▼
GitHub Release asset: microsoft-ai-roundup.db
     │
     ▼
NPX MCP Server (stdio)
  └─ Downloads DB on first run → caches in ~/.microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp/
  └─ Re-checks for updates weekly (7-day staleness + tag diff)
  └─ In-memory cosine similarity + SQL LIKE keyword search

Search implementation (honest version): semantic search loads all embedding vectors into memory at startup and ranks by cosine similarity in JavaScript; keyword search uses SQL LIKE (exact phrase first, then per-word fallback). Hybrid mode merges and de-duplicates both result sets. No sqlite-vec, no FTS5 — deliberately simple, and more than adequate at this archive's scale.

Automated Weekly Updates

A GitHub Actions workflow runs every Tuesday at 09:00 UTC (the morning after the newsletter's usual Monday publish). It incrementally ingests any new issues, verifies the database, and publishes it as a new GitHub Release tagged db-YYYY.MM.DD-NNNN. The NPX server picks up the new database automatically within a week (or immediately on a fresh install). A workflow_dispatch trigger provides a manual escape hatch for off-schedule publishes or full rebuilds.

Cache Locations

OS	Path
Windows	%USERPROFILE%\.microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp\
macOS / Linux	~/.microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp/

Delete the folder to force a fresh download of the latest database.

Local Development / Ingestion

git clone https://github.com/darrenjrobinson/microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp
cd microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp
npm install
npm run build

# Build the search index locally (requires an OpenAI API key for embeddings)
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
node dist/scripts/ingest.js               # full ingest
node dist/scripts/ingest.js --incremental # only new issues

# On Windows there's a PowerShell wrapper:
./scripts/ingest.ps1 -Incremental

# Run the server against your local database
MSAI_ROUNDUP_DB_PATH=./microsoft-ai-roundup.db npx microsoft-ai-roundup-mcp

Environment variable	Used by	Purpose
OPENAI_API_KEY	ingest + server	Embeddings (required for ingest; optional for the server's semantic search)
INGEST_DB_PATH	ingest	Output database path (default ./microsoft-ai-roundup.db)
MSAI_ROUNDUP_DB_PATH	server	Use a local database instead of downloading from GitHub Releases

Permissions & Licensing

Newsletter content is © Merill Fernando & Joshua Fernando. This project indexes the freely available public archive via the public Substack API (all posts are free, audience: "everyone") and always links back to the original issues. The code is MIT licensed.

Credits

• Newsletter: Merill Fernando & Joshua Fernando — msai.ms
• MCP server: Darren Robinson
• Sister project: entra-news-mcp for entra.news