If you’re one for listening to stuff rather than reading, Google’s new change should cater to you. The Mountain View tech giant is rolling out an audio briefing in its Google News app. It was teased earlier this month as an experiment for those who prefer listening rather than reading while commuting or working out. This is now reportedly rolling out.
Google News app rolling out audio briefings
Google News audio briefing is available on Android and iOS with app version 6.5+. This reportedly relies on improved Gemini voices and includes emotion detection. This should make listening to headlines engaging. You get a dedicated interface to consume audio. There’s a “Listen” tab at the bottom, tapping which will open an audio player that offers a “Google News Audio briefing.”
The card above the player shows clear attribution and also direct links to the full articles for you to read. The audio player interface is quite straightforward. You get regular controls like play and pause, skip forward (30 seconds), and skip-backward (15 seconds) buttons. It supports background playback. You can also control the playback speed from 0.75x up to 2x. This means you can listen to the audio at a faster or slightly slower pace.
This isn’t available everywhere yet
However, audio briefings reportedly aren’t available everywhere yet. Currently, the access apparently depends on your settings. Users outside supported regions can still get access to the feature by switching their “Language & regions of interest” to the United States. You can get to this option by tapping the profile picture icon at the top-right corner and choosing “News settings.”
Google hasn’t said when audio briefings will be available globally. But for now, it’s said to be a US-focused test that’s accessible by changing some settings. Besides this, Google already offers summaries, AI-generated overviews, and conversational tools in Search and Gemini.
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