Google’s Daily Listen turns search results into personalized AI podcasts

The news: Google can now transform search results and discovery feeds into customized, AI-generated podcasts.

• The experimental feature, called “Daily Listen,” creates a podcast that’s up to five minutes long with an overview of stories and topics and an interface with links to related articles.
• The AI podcast’s prompts come from your own search and browsing history, rather than from a text prompt.

The feature is available in the Google app on Android and iOS devices that are opted into its Search Labs program.

The trend: Consumers are interested in news content they can consume on the go, whether that’s through podcasts, apps, or radio. Fifty-eight percent of Americans prefer to get their news on a digital device, per Pew Research, and only 5% prefer print publications.

Turning search results into audio could appeal to multitaskers who want to stay updated on news without swiping through their phone. And news podcasts are the most popular genre among 38% of registered US voters, second only to comedy podcasts, per Voxtopia.

Fake news risks: Although the podcasts pull content from human-written articles, it’s risky to rely on AI to understand articles’ full context and publisher trustworthiness.

• Users are relying on the AI to provide a high-quality listening experience that matches their interests and decide what’s relevant in complex news stories.
• The podcast could present a biased or incomplete version of a story to fit its own short format.

Publisher concerns: Daily Listen is another Google AI tool that saves users the time it takes to flip through pages of search results—at the expense of web publishers’ ad revenue and traffic.

Its predecessor, AI Overviews, helps users quickly find compiled answers to their questions but also reduces user traffic on individual websites. That AI tool, which publishers have to opt into if they want their content to appear in search results, could cost the publishing industry up to $2 billion in ad revenues annually, per Raptive.

Our take: Daily Listen shows Google’s ongoing efforts to dominate consumer engagement, even as it battles the US Department of Justice to control Chrome. If the AI podcast further reduces traffic on websites, it could drive publishers to opt out of Google’s search results entirely.

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