Over the years podcasts have gained a lot of traction. Lots of people rely on them to keep up to date on the latest events, or just to kill time. Anyway, podcasting is at an all-time high right now. But to complement that, there really haven’t been any clean apps. Sure, there are lots of them out there that offer a nicely customizable interface, but very few of them are minimalist. Enter Google Podcasts.
Google Podcasts is, as the name suggests, the search giant’s venture into the podcast listening experience. As is all things Google, you’ll get customized recommendations based on your previous listening experiences. And the best part is, the app ties into the larger ecosystem as well! You can give a command to the Google Assistant regarding any Podcast-related action, and it’ll fire up the app right away.
Oh, and yes, you can download individual episodes. You can set it up so that these downloaded episodes will be automatically deleted after a certain amount of time.
Google Podcasts product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen wrote the following in a blog post about the app’s launch: “While there are more podcasts than ever before, there continues to be an imbalance in who is creating them. Looking at top charts, only about a quarter of the most popular podcasts tend to be hosted by women, and even fewer by people of color.”
Given how strongly Google is pushing AI, they’ve also listed the following features to come in future updates:
…as speech-to-text technology continues to improve, we’ll be able to provide new features like automatic subtitling, which is especially helpful if you are hearing impaired or in a noisy area without headphones. Powered by Google Translate, subtitles can then be made available in a wide variety of languages, further improving access to podcasts.
Time will tell just how better this app can get, & whether it’ll truly become the all-in-one Podcasting app that so many of us need.
Google Podcasts is available for Android on the Play Store.
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