Google Assistant is Getting a “Your News Update” Feature
Google Assistant is getting a major upgrade centered around how the voice-powered platform recites the news to you.
Already, Google Assistant has several ways of fetching and delivering the news. Users can ask you for specific topics, get the latest or just get bombarded by everything from a specific news provider.
Now with a new “Your News Update”, the Califonia-based tech company is betting big time on its algorithms to find and get you news relevant to your interest.
The new update to Assistant is similar to how the search giant uses its algorithmic prediction based on location, buying habits, and other specific details to tailor ads to users. Only this time, Google is using how it delivers ads to deliver what it thinks is news relevant to you.
Google has partnered with several high-profile entertainment and news broadcasting companies like ABC, NBA, The Daily, New York Times, CNN including smaller radio stations. Google will scan the audio source of these stations and match them with data it already has on you, and finally predict news it thinks is relevant to you in the form of bites.
Google will layout the feed for audio the same way it does with Google news only this time you don’t have the luxury of scanning through the list yourself and picking the news you would like readout.
However, on top of being able to tell Assistant to “skip” the current news it’s reading out, you can head to settings and tweak it to your preference.
Your News Update is currently only available in English and temporarily exclusive to the United States. But Google is hoping to expand internationally within next year.
You might not have realized it from the animation, but this is showing Google/Nest Home and Android Auto, not Chrome OS. The illustrations of this article show settings of a device that can configure Google/Nest Home services; Chrome OS cannot, and has a long way to go to catch up. Basically, the Assistant described here is NOT that of Chrome OS, but Android. They may both be called Assistant, but their feature sets, services and configuration are substantially different. Google has forked up this up badly. Google first forked this up by how it added Assistant to Chrome OS, not… Read more »
Thank you for the insightful comment. Though the article didn’t specifically mention which variant of Assistant is getting the update, I was assuming that it will come to Chrome OS sooner rather than later. Also, I don’t feel like Google has messed anything up by merging its smart home products under one banner. Having a singular brand will deter fragmentation and make life a lot easier for buyers.