Google is planning to introduce audio search
Google is leading the search engines market, and Google search can give accurate search results for text, images, and videos. Google is always developing its search engine and trying to improve the users’ experience as much as possible. And now the tech giant is planning to make Audio content searchable.
“Right now Google is really good at giving you text and video related to your search query. With all the amazing work podcasters are publishing each day, there’s no good reason why audio isn’t a first-class citizen in the same way” said Zach Reneau-Wedeen the head of Google’s podcast team in a recent interview.
The main reason that drove Google to work on this field is the increasing number of podcasts every day, with a lot of music streaming platforms, podcast producers can distribute their work for more and more people, we can say it’s how radio shows evolved and adapted to the new technology.
Google has already started its plan, and the first version of the new podcast product is already available through Google Search on Android and Google Assistant. When you search for a certain podcast, Google Search will show you the latest episodes with a play button next to each episode as a first result, and if you ask for more episode, a subscribe option will appear as well as a full list of the podcast episodes, a notification will appear at the top of the page asking if you want to add a podcast shortcut to your home screen.
It’s the same for Google Assistant as well, to play a podcast, all you need to do is to say “Ok Google, play the name of the podcast” and this will work on any device that has Google Assistant, while everything synced for Google Assistant, it doesn’t matter where you play it, Google will pick up where you stopped the last time.
But Google won’t stop here. It’s not enough for Google that when you search for a podcast, the podcast will show up as the first results, the tech giant is going to incorporate podcast metadata into search results. That means that podcasts will show up in the search results when the topic or person you are searching for is mentioned in the podcast. This will open a whole new field of audio SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and with the emergence of smart speakers and voice assistants, it will so useful to have audio answers for search queries, but this is not that easy for Google, in order to do that, Google needs to find a way to know what each podcast is about, and to audio search for words in each episode, and this needs to be fast, as fast as Google search is with text, images, and videos right now.
Although implementing searchable audio in Google search is a great step, podcasts and audio content are becoming more and more popular, and people would like to listen to podcasts in while doing many activities like driving, or walking a dog. But what if you don’t want to search for podcast all the time? Google should take in consideration when and where to deliver searchable audio, for example not that many people would listen to a podcast on their laptops, most likely it’s on their smartphones. That’s another issue that Google might face while improving their searchable audio technology.
While Google’s podcast team is working on solving all the problems to make audio content searchable, all we have to do is wait, maybe we will witness a podcast revolution in the next few years.
Read also: Google is working on ‘Chat’ the new technology after SMS
