voice + video blog
Google showing yet more love to audiobooks
Google is ramping up its audiobook feature set to include support for Google Assistant.
The latest changes come on the back of the addition of audiobooks to Google’s Play Store earlier in the year which brought audiobook purchase and playback to devices such as Google Home.
Smart Resume lets you seamlessly pause your listening and even switch between devices without losing your position. It’s more than just picking up from where you were. In fact, your audiobook reader will rewind to the start of the sentence you were last listening to.
Bookmarks let you store an exact point in a book in order to easily share or revisit the moment.
Routines provide integration with Google Assistant to include audiobook reading as part of other tasks. For example, you can incorporate a reading of an audiobook into your daily commute Routine, enabling you to listen to your day’s appointments and activities, have the weather announced then resume reading of an audiobook – all without taking your hands off the steering wheel.
Another change to Google’s audiobook functionality is playback speed control. You can now speed up or slow down the reading of your audiobook.
These new features will roll out to Android, iOS and other Google Assistant enabled devices soon. The changes demonstrate Google’s commitment to audiobooks and perhaps indicate a fresh challenge to the dominance of Audible, the leading audiobook portal and provider.
Posted by Tim Longhurst on Fri 30 Mar 2018.
