IT Blog | Mr. HiTech Tech Blog

Google is rolling out a new service for Google Assistant that it’s calling “Your News Update.” It takes the idea of an algorithmically determined news feed — the kind you get from Facebook or on Google’s news feed — and turns it into an audio stream. To play it, you simply ask a Google smart speaker or Assistant on your phone to “listen to the news.” Google uses the information it has learned about you over the years alongside your location to custom-build a series of short news updates from partners from which it has licensed audio. It hopes to foster an ecosystem it’s calling “the audio web,” according to Liz Gannes, Google’s product manager of audio news. These aren’t podcasts so much as news bites, similar to the hourly news updates that can be heard on the radio. Your News Update replaces the current way of getting news updates from Assistant, which consists of a straightforward list of news sources. With that system, you have to choose which sources you want and what order they’re played in. Before, you would have had to ask for the news and hear the hourly update from NPR, then The Daily from The New York Times, then CNN (or whichever news sources you chose). Now, you will hear individual, topic-specific news bites from Google’s news partners. And instead of it cycling hourly or daily, it will play based on those topics. Google says that once Your News Update goes live, users will be able to choose between either the new system or the original one. Google has licensed audio from a variety of news sources, including ABC, Cheddar, The Associated Press, CNN, Fox News Radio, PBS, Reuters, WYNC, and a bunch of local radio stations. It can then identify the content of those outlets’ news stories by reading specific metadata they create for their stories and by using its computers to listen to the stories themselves. Google has paid its partners to work with the company to create their stories in this format. Google Audio in hand, Google can then arrange it in a news feed for you, just as it arranges a news feed on the web. For each story, the outlet that produced it is read out before it begins. It starts with a top national or international story or two, moves on to local stories, then it tends to play stories that are more likely to be relevant to your interests. (For me, that meant stories about the Minnesota Vikings and tech.) After a while, the stories shift formats from short one- to two-minute updates into longer, more podcast-like stories. If that sounds a lot like what you get from the NPR One app, that’s because it is. But Google is pulling from a larger pool of sources, and NPR isn’t one of them. That’s one reason why I won’t be using Google’s new system. But the main problem I have with this kind of news feed is that while
Read More