The Future of News on Smart Speakers
At Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen checks in on whether and how people are consuming news on smart speakers and smart displays. It turns out, they aren’t, really:
Smart speaker news briefings didn’t get much love from users in this research. Here are some of the complaints Newman heard:
— Overlong updates — the typical duration is around five minutes, but many wanted something much shorter.
— They are not updated often enough. News and sports bulletins are sometimes hours or days out of date.
— Some bulletins still use synthesized voices (text to speech), which many find hard to listen to.
— Some updates have low production values or poor audio quality.
— Where bulletins from different providers run together, there is often duplication of stories.
— Some updates have intrusive jingles or adverts.
— There is no opportunity to skip or select stories.
Based on my experience with these devices and general trends in news and media consumption, I have a few predictions as to how this will change in the near future:
- Audio news updates will get shorter and more specialized. The New York Times using The Daily as a “flash briefing” is really the ne plus ultra of cramming content not designed for smart speakers into the space. I had to pull them as a news source because of it.
- Audio news updates will move from pull to push. Unless you put it on “do not disturb,” you’ll hear a news update just after it’s posted, rather than having to ask for it.
- In other words, autoplay is coming.
- Video will get more important as more of these devices add screens. And video offers all sorts of extra affordances and business models.
- All of these things will happen faster than the advertisements improving. That’ll happen last if it happens at all.
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