Chrome‘s ‘Listen to this page’ feature is great when you’re trying to get other work done while also trying to consume important information. As the feature’s name suggests, it essentially reads out webpages to you, something that’s incredibly useful for lengthy news articles and akin.
However, the tool isn’t necessarily smart. It’s a simple text-to-speech model that reads what it sees, and Google wants to change that.
The Mountain View, California-based tech giant is looking to integrate NotbookLM-like Audio Overviews into the feature, and it could do so on a very specific Chrome for Android screen.
First spotted in late June, a new Listen to the feed feature is now beginning to make its way to users running Chrome Canary, as pointed out by browser expert Leopeva64 on X (Twitter). It appears on Chrome for Android’s home/New tab screen, and essentially gives you a quick podcast-style conversational summary of all the articles in the page’s Discover Feed. The voices and style of discussion used sound just like NotebookLM’s implementation, suggesting that the tech giant is using the same tech stack to power Chrome’s potentially upcoming feature.
Still in its early stages
After you tap the new ‘Listen to the feed’ button, Chrome takes a few seconds to generate an AI playback, after which it opens a media player in its collapsed state with your Audio Overview playing.
Tapping the player expands it, revealing the title of the article currently in discussion, its source website, a timeline, buttons to skip or rewind by 10 seconds, buttons to skip to the next or previous article, and a play/pause button. The media player also matches your device’s theme, as seen in the embedded tweet above.
For what it’s worth, the feature isn’t available to me on Chrome Canary just yet, suggesting that even on the experimental build, it hasn’t made its way to all. We’re looking at late October or early November if the feature were to make its way to stable.
