Google’s new Daily Listen is a personalized, AI-powered news podcast

Google has another new product for you to try, and once again it’s all about AI: it’s called Daily Listen, and it summarizes news topics Your Discover feed and web searches to create a short podcast with the headlines. You can think of it like a personalized daily newscast created just for you.

There’s no official Google announcement of the feature, but the company has provided key details to several outlets, including 9to5Google. It is also promoted on social media by Google engineers including Simon Tokumine And Osama Bin Shafqat– both work at Google Labs, where Google tests many of its latest ideas.

Daily Listen lives in the Google app for Android or iOS on your phone and is currently a Search Labs feature exclusive to users in the US. You need to sign up for Daily Listen to try it: Tap the science flask icon in the top left corner of the Home tab in the Google app to try it Sign in (according to TokuminePlaces are limited). You can also find search labs on the internet here.

This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been removed.

Once this is done, Daily Listen should appear under the main search bar in the app’s Home tab. Tap it to get a roughly five-minute summary of the news you think Google might interest you — based on what you searched for and what’s on the Discover page — narrated by an AI voice. You will also receive a transcript of what was said and links to the articles referenced at the end.

Here you’ll find the usual podcast playback controls, and you can adjust the playback speed if necessary. There’s also the familiar message “Generative AI is experimental” – given the nature of generative AI, the assumption is that parts of your artificially generated news summary may not be entirely accurate, but of course Google didn’t mention that when it launched the feature.

If this technology sounds familiar, it might be because you can do something similar the research tool Google NotebookLM: In this app you can create a document based on any combination of documents, texts and web links that you have compiled as a project. Presumably some of the same AI tricks are also required in summarizing the information, tweaking the audio, and creating a synthesized spoken audio version of the results.

The same technology was used in NotebookLM.
Photo credit: Google

According to a statement from a Google spokesperson Search engine landDaily Listen is “a personalized, AI-powered audio experience in the Google app on Android and iOS that makes it easy to stay up-to-date on the topics that interest you. Once you’ve tried NotebookLM’s audio overviews, it’s like getting a quick overview of everything you should know, personalized for you!”

There’s no guarantee that the rollout will eventually be anything more than an experiment for everyone – Google will notoriously bad to stick with products – but if it has a long-term future, expect it to grow in features and scope. Maybe Google will allow it interact with the podcast or at least customize it like you can now do with the podcast maker in NotebookLM (Google has confirmed both Daily Listen and NotebookLM). Use the same AI).

Apparently it may take a day or so for the feature to appear in search labs and become available once you’ve signed up. As with everything else released through Google’s experimental platform, you can provide feedback on how well the feature works: start with the thumbs up or thumbs down icons on the podcast player.