If Google’s smart device ecosystem is lacking one major thing, it’s the ability to play your podcasts from your chosen service.
Today brings news we’ve awaited for a long long time – that feature may be landing soon, with potential integration for 3rd party podcast services into the Google Assistant ecosystem spotted in a new menu in Google Assistant’s services settings.
That new menu lists ‘Podcasts – Services used to play news’ as a configurable option. If you go into that setting there’s unfortunately only one provider at the moment — Google Podcasts — but it does hint at a future ability to add other providers as well.
Since the first time we used the original Google Home speaker we have wanted the ability to use a service like Pocket Casts to play podcasts without having to cast it to a speaker, and it appearts that time may finally be here… well, soon, anyway.
This doesn’t necessarily herald immediate rollout of the feature, though. Some Assistant services are still only limited to one provider, but with changes to the Assistant media APIs at this year’s Voice Global developer event, the building blocks to support such a rollout look to be in place.
I guess we just have to sit back and wait… and maybe listen to a podcast while we wait.
