Google announced audio news for the Google Assistant. This is not speakable markup. or YouTube videos playing on the Google Home Hub, this is real audio news, like broadcaster, podcaster, etc that produce audio form content.
Google said they are opening a developer preview that you can fill out a form over here to participate in. Google said:
This new experience will bring you an audio news playlist assembled in that moment, for you. It starts with a briefing of top stories and updates on topics you care about, and extends into longer-form content that dives deeper into more stories. At any point in your day when you want to listen to the latest news—as a morning wake-up, during your commute, or while jogging—the Google Assistant will be ready with new stories and updates to the ones you’ve already heard. Plus, using your voice, you can easily ask the Google Assistant to skip a story, go back or stop.To improve and build out this audio news experience, we’ve built an open specification, available for news organizations that would like to participate. The prototype relies on single-topic stories—segmented out from newscasts or shows—to contribute to the audio news feed.
Audio journalism requires new capabilities and workflows for both print publishers and broadcasters, whether it's adding a sound booth or segmenting larger broadcasts into shorter stories. To help with this, the Google News Initiative provided funding to a number of news organizations, such as KQED and McClatchy, to support building out more audio capabilities for the industry as a whole.
Here is the content guidelines for this audio news format.
So if you do podcasting or broadcasting, might be worth exploring.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
