Hey Google, what’s the latest news?

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Since launching the Google Assistant in 2016, we have seen users ask questions about everything
from weather to recipes and news. In order to fulfill news queries with results people can count
on, we collaborated on a new
schema.org structured data specification called speakable
for eligible publishers to mark up
sections of a news article that are most relevant to be read aloud by the Google Assistant.

When people ask the Google Assistant—”Hey Google, what’s the latest news on NASA?”, the
Google Assistant responds with an excerpt from a news article and the name of the news
organization. Then the Google Assistant asks if the user would like to hear another news article
and also sends the relevant links to the user’s mobile device.

As a news publisher, you can surface your content on the Google Assistant by implementing
Speakable markup according to the
developer documentation. This
feature is now available for English language users in the US and we hope to launch in other
languages and countries as soon as a sufficient number of publishers have implemented speakable.
As this is a new feature, we are experimenting over time to refine the publisher and user
experience.

If you have any questions, ask us in the
Webmaster Help Forum. We look
forward to hearing from you!

Posted by TV Raman, Senior Staff Software Engineer