The overlap between those who listen to Podcasts and those who own smart speakers is likely to be pretty big, and for users of Pocket Casts there’s some excellent news today. Pocket Casts is coming to the Amazon Echo via a new Alexa Skill.
The recent update to Pocket Casts introduced the ability to sync your current play progress and your ‘Up Next’ queue. Thanks to these changes Pocket Casts now has the functionality to integrate with smart speakers, well the Amazon Alexa at least for now.
If you’ve got an Amazon Alexa and you’re a Pocket Casts user you can grab instructions on how to link your account here.
At launch, you’ll be able to use Alexa to pick-up where you left off by saying “Alexa, ask Pocket Casts to play my Up Next”, or play a specific podcast by saying “Alexa, ask Pocket Casts to play the latest episode of All About Android” or ask for a recommendation by saying “Alexa, ask Pocket Casts to give me a recommendation” which will provide a recommendation based on your listening history. For a full list of commands check out the FAQ here.
For users of Google Assistant speakers, the big question in the room is when is integration with Google Assistant coming? We contacted Shifty Jelly who said that:
Google don’t have public APIs for resuming audio from a defined spot or reporting playback progress. So currently we can’t make an Assistant integration because every podcast would begin from 0 and never save where you got to.
With Google looking to improve their own podcast offering we hope that they will create the public API required to allow third party podcast services to integrate with their smart platform. We will keep you posted as we hear more.
