Google is working on an innovation for Your News Update which will become a personalized experience. As reported by Wired, this would act a bit like a personalized music playlist but for news.
Google News has worked to improve its functionality over the years. Most recently it began including weather alerts into its temperature cards. Before this, it enhanced its sporting coverage with improved information provided for fans.
Now it looks like Google will improve its audio output when it comes to news. Google will add to the existing aggregation service Your News Update. The idea being to gather audio clips to play them in one continuous loop.
Google to offer personalized news experience
An easy way to understand this new service would be to look at it like Feedly or Flipboard-type service for spoken stories. However, this concerns news stories from your favourite publications and on topics that interest you.
Google has improved the experience to try and make it more digestible and enjoyable for users. Instead of working through a chain of uninteresting and desperate stories this service now offers users a personalized experience.
Each playlist will mimic a normal news program like you would hear on the radio. They will begin with headlines that then shift into longer, more detailed stories. The idea is to compile podcast snippets with radio and text-to-speech article translations.
The service is now available and thanks to its wealth of user knowledge should offer a bespoke experience. For example, your broadcast may focus on the sports teams you follow or the publications you read.
It is, therefore, another service that relies on Google knowing an awful lot about you and your life. Google’s algorithms search for keywords in stories that are most likely to correspond to your interests.
Google has partnered with many news outlets to try and optimize this service as much as possible. Liz Gannes, product manager for Google News, has said, “local is this incredibly important part of the news experience”. Hence the desire for this bespoke service.
New service comes with its own newscaster voice
Previously, transitions between stories were handled by Assistant which would announce the outlet behind each story. Now the new service comes with its “newscaster voice” which should be less robotic and capture the nuance of individual stories.
The overall goal behind this is to create a smooth and unbroken feel between stories in the broadcast. Hannah McBride, a conversation designer at Google said, “we have this voice that is sort of connecting it all. It introduces each topic and, in some cases, will even be really specific about what the story is about”.
One of the issues with this new service is that it makes the user less likely to seek out the original news outlet. Google does pay some news outlets for the stories but it does not compensate for text-to-speech conversions.
Phil Napoli, a media researcher at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy argues that this is not so much of a problem though. He claims that the type of user that would come to a news outlet through aggregated news is unlikely to subscribe and thus not that useful from an economic standpoint anyway.
However, there is still the issue of ‘filter bubbles’ and the idea of an echo chamber. Personalized newscasts may run the risk of missing the context surrounding stories.
Napoli says that if “you’re flipping through a newspaper, there are stories you might end up reading that you would not have read otherwise.” However, that will not happen with this new service.
Google claims the service does not take into account a publications political leanings instead is based on freshness, keywords, and location. Gannes says “it tends to be a little bit more straight news” rather than opinionated stories.