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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Google has introduced podcast-style news audio briefings.
- You can choose which news sources you want to use.
- Briefings are around 15 minutes long.
If you want to stay on top of the daily news but don’t have time to read, Google has a new way to keep you updated.
Starting Thursday, you can listen to an AI-generated audio news roundup of news that’s important to you through the Google News app. The audio isn’t just text-to-speech, but a podcast-style discussion between two hosts. I don’t have the feature yet, but it sounds a lot like the feature that lets you turn your Google searches into a podcast.
The interface has traditional media player controls like play and pause, and you can skip forward and backward or change your playback speed.
Also: You can turn your Google search into a podcast now – here’s how
A headline appears during the discussion of each article, along with a logo that shows the source. There’s a “See featured article” button if you want to open the full article. You can’t ask the podcast follow-up questions yet, as you can with the similar feature on NotebookLM.
Google said about a week ago that it was “experimenting” with the feature for those who prefer listening, but didn’t give a timeline when it might roll out to everyone.
To use the new feature, tap the “Listen” tab at the bottom of your screen. It’s located on the right, beside “Following” and “Newstand.” The information comes from News Briefing, a feature that lets you browse top headlines, see news in specific content categories like business, entertainment, or sports, or read articles from a specific media outlet. Google pulls the news from dozens of different outlets, and you can select which ones you want to prioritize and remove ones you don’t want to see.
From reports I’ve seen, the summaries include about half a dozen articles and are around 15 minutes long.
I’ve reached out to Google for more details.
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