After coming up with a series of personalized audio news playlist for google assistant last year, Google has now enabled the same feature for its Google Podcasts handle. Using the ‘Your News Update’ feature, users will be able to get news updates in audio format through the Google Podcast as well.
The audio news feature makes use of machine learning in order to understand preferences, and deliver tailor-made news stories according to the reader’s wants. This in stark contrast to its competitor Alexa’s Flash Briefing, which leaves it upon the user to customize their news listening experience. Instead, Your News makes use of data given to Google such as location, priorities, and preferences to provide an optimum user experience.
Moreover, it would also work the other way around, as data collected from the feature would be further used in other Google products to deliver a much more personalized experience to the user. The Your News feature relies upon algorithms to do the personalization rather than understanding personal choices or demographic conditions. Hence, political bias is not present.
The crafting of news pieces by Your News would be largely based around frequented stories, which would help in tailoring articles based around hometown sports teams, local news, and so on.
With the addition of the successful feature on Google Podcast, the company claims that it would be able to spread news pieces to reach a much wider audience.
Navigating the feature is easy, as users can personalize their preferences from the explore tab of their Google Podcasts application. Topics relating to their location, and preferences will be delivered.
Google has partnered with a number of agencies, such as USA Today, ABC, Evening Standard, Billboard, etc to bring a large variety of content to its users.
In addition to the podcast feature, users can also access the Your News update by simply tasking Google assistant by simply saying “Hey Google, play local news” to hear a collection of local news stories. Played via text to speech.
Google expects to deliver a personalized tailor-made news experience to its users through this update.
