Google’s New Daily Listen Is a Personalized News Podcast Powered by AI
Google has another new product you can try, and it’s again powered by artificial intelligence: It’s called Daily Listen, and it summarizes news topics from your Discover feed and online searches to create a short podcast with news headlines. You can think of it as a personalized daily newsletter created just for you.
There has been no official announcement from Google about the feature, but the company has provided key details to several outlets, including 9to5Google . It’s also being promoted on social media by Google engineers including Simon Tokumine and Osama Bin Shafqat – both of whom work at Google Labs, where Google tests many of its newest ideas.
Daily Listen is available in the Google Android or iOS app on your phone, and is currently a Search Labs feature exclusive to US users. To try Daily Listen, you’ll need to turn it on: Tap the science flask icon at the top. left corner of the Home tab in the Google app for registration ( according to Tokumine , space is limited). You can also find search labs online here .
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Once done, “Daily Listening” should appear under the main search bar in the Home tab of the app. Click on it to get a roughly five-minute summary of news stories Google thinks you’ll be interested in—based on what you searched for and what’s on the Discover page—narrated by an AI voice. You also get a text transcript of what is said and links to articles listed at the end.
The usual podcast playback controls are here, and you can adjust the playback speed if needed. There’s also the familiar “Generative AI is experimental” message – given the nature of generative AI, it’s assumed that parts of your artificially generated roundup might not be entirely accurate, but of course that’s something Google didn’t mention at launch. this feature.
If this technology sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you can do something similar in Google’s NotebookLM research tool : in this app, you can create a document based on any combination of documents, text, and web links you’ve collected together as a project. Presumably, some of the same AI techniques are involved in summarizing information, adjusting tone, and creating a synthesized voice audio version of the results.
According to a Google spokesperson in a statement to Search Engine Land , Daily Listen is “an AI-powered personalized audio experience in the Google app on Android and iOS, where you can easily stay up to date on the topics that interest you. If you’ve tried NotebookLM’s audio reviews, it’s like a summary of the important stuff, personalized for you!”
There’s no guarantee that we’ll eventually see this rollout for everyone as anything more than an experiment—Google is notoriously bad at sticking to products—but if it has a long-term future, expect it to grow in terms of features and volume . Perhaps Google will allow you to interact with the podcast , or at least customize it, as you can now do with the podcast builder in NotebookLM (Google has confirmed that both Daily Listen and NotebookLM use the same artificial intelligence ).
Obviously, it may take a day or so before this feature appears in the Search Labs and becomes available upon your consent. As with everything released through Google’s experimental platform, you’ll be able to give feedback on how well this feature works: start with the thumbs up or thumbs down icons in your podcast player.