Google’s New ‘Daily Listen’ Is a Personalized AI-Powered News Podcast
Google has another new product for you to test, and once again, it’s centered on AI: It’s called Daily Listen, and it sums up news topics from your Discover feed and web searches to produce a short podcast of the news headlines. You can think of it as a personalized daily news bulletin created just for you.
There’s no official Google announcement of the feature, but the company provided the key details to multiple outlets, including 9to5Google. It’s also being promoted on social media by Google engineers including Simon Tokumine and Usama Bin Shafqat—they both work at Google Labs, where Google tests a lot of its newest ideas.
Daily Listen lives in the Google app for Android or iOS on your phone, and right now is a Search Labs feature exclusive to users in the U.S. You need to opt into Daily Listen to give it a try: Tap the science flask icon in the top left corner of the Home tab in the Google app to sign up (according to Tokumine, spaces are limited). You can also find Search labs on the web here.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
With that done, Daily Listen should pop up under the main search bar on the Home tab in the app. Tap on it to get a roughly five-minute summary of the news Google thinks you’ll be interested in—based on what you’ve been searching for, and what’s on the Discover page—narrated by an AI voice. You also get a text transcript of what’s being said, and links to the articles referenced at the end.
The usual podcast playback controls are here, and you can adjust playback speed if you need to. There’s also a familiar “Generative AI is experimental” message—given the nature of generative AI, the assumption is that parts of your artificially generated news round up might not be completely accurate, but of course this is something Google hasn’t mentioned while launching the feature.
If this tech seems familiar, it may be because you can do something similar in the Google NotebookLM research tool: In that app, you can produce a document based on any combination of documents, text, and web links you’ve gathered together as a project. Presumably some of the same AI tricks are involved in summarizing the info, tweaking the tone, and producing a synthesized spoken audio version of the results.
The same tech has been used in NotebookLM.
Credit: Google
According to a statement given by a Google spokesperson to Search Engine Land, Daily Listen is “a personalized AI-powered audio experience on the Google app on Android and iOS, where you can easily stay up to date on the topics you care about. If you’ve tried NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews, it’s kind of like getting a quick rundown of things to know, personalized for you!”
There’s no guarantee that we’ll eventually see this roll out to everyone as anything more than an experiment—Google is notoriously bad at sticking with products—but if it does have a long-term future, expect it to grow in terms of features and scope. Perhaps Google will let you interact with the podcast or at least customize it, as you can now do with the podcast maker in NotebookLM (Google has confirmed both Daily Listen and NotebookLM use the same AI).
Apparently it might take a day or so for the feature to show up in Search Labs, and to be available once you’ve opted in. As with everything else released through Google’s experimental platform, you’ll be able to offer feedback on how well the feature works: Start with the thumbs up or thumbs down icons on the podcast player.
