What you need to know
- Google is testing a Daily Listen feature that turns your Discover feed into a five-minute podcast.
- The experiment is starting out a Search Labs feature, and users in the U.S. on iOS and Android can opt-in.
- The podcast will be tailored to your individual preferences using your Discover and Search data.
Google surprisingly played a significant role in Spotify's Wrapped 2024 experience with Audio Overviews, an AI-generated podcast that recapped your year in music leveraging NotebookLM. Now, the company is testing out a Search Labs feature that would let you recap your daily news in a similar way. Instead of revisiting your Spotify playback history, this experimental "Daily Listen" feature sums up your Google Discover feed in a five-minute audio podcast.
Google Discover, a news aggregator that appears in the Google app and Android, has quickly become a popular way for people to find stories. Taking account your Discover and Search history, Daily Listen will pick the articles that are most interesting to you and review them in audio form (via 9to5Google).
The test is starting as a Search Labs feature, which you may be able to participate in by tapping the Labs icon in the top-left corner of the Google app. From there, look for the Daily Listen card to opt-in. It's available to Google app users on iOS and Android in the U.S., but may not show up for everyone immediately.
After opting-into Daily Listen, users can expect it to take about a day for the first audio recap to appear in the Google app. When available, it'll show as a block on the Google app homepage, between the Search bar and the Discover feed. Tapping it will start the podcast-like experience, fully featured with playback controls and timestamps.
The Daily Listen experiment, albeit only a test at the moment, appears to be yet another step by Google toward the so-called "zero-click internet." By summing up Discover posts in audio form, Google app users may have less incentive to navigate to the website providing the information recapped in Daily Listen episodes. This tracks with other Search Labs features, like AI Overviews, which have since been opened up to the public.
