Who knew that Google was about to launch its very own Podcasts app- until Today. The application is going to be available for users to download starting today. Rather unsurprisingly, like Google always go about things, its podcast app is called what? Google Podcasts.
Yes, Google goes about things rather simple, maybe because that’s the main part of any SEO – Keep it simple and straightforward hitting the right keywords. Nevertheless, the Google Podcasts app is rather interesting, since you can easily synchronize progress across devices on which Google Assistant is turned on. Furthermore, the podcasts are recommended tailored to your taste, therefore, that’s a great level of personalization.
Sadly, never before has a stock Android app, and many from phone manufacturers featured a pre-installed podcasts application. On the contrary, the operating system from Apple, iOS, has featured a dedicated podcasts application for a long time. To listen to podcasts, people generally had to make use of the Google Play Music app to manage and browse podcasts. Now people can finally enjoy a podcasts app right out the box, which works well on the Google Home speaker and integrates well with the Google Home Assistant as well.
The Podcasts app like any other podcasts provides an option to subscribe to favorite podcasts, which can be downloaded too. Furthermore, there are playback controls as well, in case you want to forward/reverse or pause/play the podcast.
On top of this, Google Podcasts seems to be rather intelligent and from data gathered from your podcast subscriptions and listening habits, it delivers more personalized content which you would like to hear. In addition to this, by syncing across the devices through the Google Assistant, you can easily continue playback at home, for instance when you have paused playback on your phone.
According to Zack Reneau-Wedeen, who happens to be the product manager on the Podcasts app, “There’s still tons of room for growth when it comes to podcast listening.” He stated that with a dedicated pre-loaded Podcasts app ” could as much as double worldwide listenership of podcasts overall.”
When you open the app, there will be a section called “For you”. Under this section, you can easily view episodes of shows you have subscribed to. In addition to this, there will also be a list of those episodes, which you hadn’t yet finished but had started listening, and left mid-way. Other than this, a list of all downloaded podcasts shall also pop-up there.
In case you want to see the latest tending podcasts or the top ones, just scroll down the app. Both of these options are available category wise and generally as well. Though, there aren’t many fine-grained controls like that on the Overcast app. This means that you won’t be able to customize the skip buttons to your looking, nor can you create custom playlists as of now- this all may change in the future though.
All these changes would only be possible through Artificial Intelligence, which will reap its fruit in a couple of months after which Google will add further features to the application. There would be closed captions to podcasts, making it easier to understand the podcasts as well, in case you have trouble understanding which may be in the case that you are in a noisy environment or you can’t hear properly or maybe the podcast you are listening to isn’t in your native language.
Furthermore, the variety of people making podcasts is rather limited. Google wants to make sure that the variety keeps on getting varied. Currently, podcasts aren’t made by many people of color, and only 25 percent of females are podcast hosts. To get these numbers up, Google has formed an independent advisory board for podcast promotion purposes. Though, don’t expect any payment from Google for creating podcasts.
If you are worried that there might not be enough podcasts, then you need not, since there are already 2 million podcasts for you to hear. According to Google, these shall include“all of the ones you’ve heard of.” Furthermore, all these podcasts can be listened to worldwide where the app is available in the 47 languages supported by Play Store. Sadly, the app isn’t available on iOS as of now. In case you want to download the app, you can do so directly by following this link.