- Google has added an experimental feature to Discover that summarizes the days stories as a podcast
- Daily Listen provides a five-minute audio recap of the day’s most relevant stories, based on your interests and previous activity
- The feature is part of the experimental Google Labs program
Google has released an experimental feature that allows users to listen to their Discover feed, rather than reading it.
Released via Google Labs, the new Daily Listen feature summarizes your news feed based on your interests, producing a short podcast covering the day’s top stories and relevant headlines.
The new feature includes stories based on your previous interactions with the Discover feed, which is itself personalized based on user data and web searches.
To enable Daily Listen, users must first enroll in the Google Labs program, which offers access to experimental and trialled features before they are widely available.
9to5Google reports that generative AI is used to compile Daily Listen, and notes that Daily Listen was made available in the US on January 8. With little in the way of an official announcement from Google, there’s no guessing whether or when this experimental feature will come to other territories.
For US users, Daily Listen can be activated by joining the Google Labs program. Google Labs can be accessed from the top-left of the Google app on either Android or iOS.
Once enabled, Daily Listen appears as a widget at the top of the Discover feed. Each ‘episode’ of the podcast lasts around five minutes. PhoneArena reports that the first Daily Listen appears a day or so after enrolling in the Google Labs program.
As well as an audio recap, the Daily Listen offers a scrolling transcript to read along with alongside the typical pause, rewind, and fast forward controls.
As Android Central highlights, Daily Listen is similar in some regards to the Audio Overview feature found in Google’s AI-powered online notetaking tool, NotebookLM.
Audio Overview was recently promoted to full feature status, losing its experimental tag and becoming fully integrated into NotebookLM. Daily Listen is still too new to predict whether it’ll be integrated into Discover properly.
That said, Google seems to be pushing for an increasingly audio-based relationship with our devices through features like Gemini Live, so I won’t be surprised if Daily Listen is here to stay.
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