After killing off its first attempt at a podcast app back in 2012, Google is trying once again with the aptly named Podcasts app. While you can play podcasts through Google Play Music, Zack Reneau-Wedeen, product manager for this standalone app believes it “could as much as double worldwide listenership of podcasts overall.”
The app, like other podcast apps, will let you search, download, and play podcasts when you want to. There are over two million podcast shows available on launch day. The app has a “For you” section to show you episodes of shows you’re subscribed to, episodes you’ve been listening to but haven’t finished, and a list of your downloaded episodes. When you scroll further down, you’ll see top and trending podcasts, both in general and by category. Unfortunately, the app is a bit barebones at the moment. For example, you can’t customize the skip buttons or create playlists of podcasts to listen to. The app is now available for Android with no plans yet to bring it to iOS.
What Google Podcasts has going for it is it integrates with Google Assistant, which means you can use the digital assistant to search and play podcasts for you. And the app syncs your place in a podcast across different Google products, so it can start playing on one device and be resumed on another. Google plans to introduce in the coming months some of the AI features Reneau-Wedeen talked about before, including real-time live transcriptions. Google also wants to help improve diversity in the podcast community.
The company formed an independent advisory board that wants to come up with ways to promote podcast production outside of the major metro areas in the US. Google won’t be paying creators directly but it wants to help promote underrepresented creators and help make recording equipment more accessible to podcasters who can’t afford them.
Source: The Verge