You Can Now Listen to Local News on Google Assistant and Google Podcasts

You can now ask your Google Nest smart speaker “Hey Google, play local news” or “Hey Google, play news about [your city],” and you’ll hear a mix of native audio and text-to-speech local news stories.

News Update is also coming to Google Podcasts in the U.S. so you can easily discover and listen to the news that’s especially timely and relevant to you. When you open the Google Podcasts app and navigate to the Explore tab, you can subscribe to Your News Update and listen to a mix of short news stories chosen in that moment based on your interests, location, user history and preferences.

This new voice model was trained on reading longer segments of text and goes beyond just reading words out loud by incorporating voice pitch, sound length and stress on certain words and syllables so that the text-to-speech voice will sound more natural and well-suited for reading the news.