News can be consumed in a variety of format, such as reading it or watching it or listening to it. Now we’re sure that many of us have envisioned a future where we can get our digital assistants to read the news to us, and now it looks like Google is hoping to make that future come true.
The company has announced a new collaboration with schema.org to develop a data specification called “speakable”. Basically what this does is that publishers can now highlight portions of their news articles that would be the most relevant, which in turn would be read aloud by Google Assistant.
According to Google, “When people ask the Google Assistant — ‘Hey Google, what’s the latest news on NASA?’, the Google Assistant responds with an excerpt from a news article and the name of the news organization.” This means that these sections would most likely contain the meat of the story and the key points, so for those who’d rather not bother with the introductions and conclusions and just want the main facts, this speakable feature will help with that.
That being said, the onus now falls onto news publishers to take advantage of implementing speakable into their articles. This means that until more publishers do that, this feature won’t be able to hit its full potential.
Filed in . Read more about Google and Google Assistant.