Google starts with spoken news bulletin in Assistant

Google has started offering a spoken news bulletin in Google Assistant, including on smart speakers. For the position, the search giant is partnering with media to offer users personalized bulletins.

The idea is that when users say “Play The News,” Assistant composes a bulletin of items the algorithm thinks users will be interested in, Google says. These can be short items of less than a minute, but the bulletin can later also contain items of a few minutes or even more than fifteen minutes.

The intention is that users can listen to the news from media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Cnet. They have to create separate feeds with news items for this. Google has drawn up guidelines for this, which state, among other things, that media should avoid words with time indications and words such as ‘breaking’.

Google has opened the application to participate with its own feed to all English-language media. The feature is currently available for a limited number of Google customers in the United States. It is not yet known when and if the feature will come to other countries and languages.