Google is bringing personalised news updates to Podcasts app, Google Assistant

Users can get personalised news updates, which includes local news, in the Google Podcasts app by subscribing to Your News Updates in the Explore tab of the app.

Google Podcasts app (Google)

Google has launched a new feature that makes it easier for users to get news updates that are customised as per their interests. The company today announced that it is bringing its Your News Update feature to Google Podcasts, which is the company's dedicated platform for podcasts.

Users can get personalised news updates, which includes local news, in the Google Podcasts app by subscribing to Your News Updates in the Explore tab of the app. Google says that once users subscribe to Your News Updates feed, they can listen to a mix of short news stories chosen in that moment based on their interests, location, user history and preferences.

The company says that this tailored experience is made possible by applying Google News's deep understanding of news stories to the audio format and personalising what users hear. The company analyses what's being said within a given audio file and then applies machine learning techniques to understand how the people, places and things in this story link together and relate to a particular person's interests.

“This technology enables us to create playlists of stories that are always up-to-date and customised for everyone who's using Your News Update. This format helps people hear stories from a variety of local and national publishers all in one place,” Google explained in its blog post.

In addition to bringing personalised news updates to its Podcasts app, Google is also making it easier for users to listen to local news using Google Assistant. Now, users can ask Google Assistant on any Nest smart speaker to play news about their city and Google's virtual assistant will play news that is a mix of native audio and text to speech local stories. All users need to do is say, “Hey Google, play news about [name of your city]” and Google will do the needful.

This update follows a feature released by the company last year wherein Google Assistant would play stories that are a mix of the news based on users' interests, location, user history preferences and top news stories.

Coming back to today's update, Google says that these features are available to users in the US and there is no word on when the company's users across the globe will get a similar update.