Google Podcasts comes to Android

Whether we’re listening to history lessons on the commute, news stories at the gym, or gripping mysteries while preparing dinner, podcasts have become an essential part of life. But, it can still be difficult to get started and find new shows you’ll love—and work still remains in making podcasts accessible and discoverable for all.

Today, we’re releasing the Google Podcasts app for Android, available globally in the Play Store. Integrated with the Google Assistant across your devices and packed with personalized recommendations, Google Podcasts is designed to make it easier than ever for Android users to discover and listen to podcasts. We’re also announcing a partnership with industry experts to improve diversity in podcast creation, and sharing a peek at how AI can help transform podcasting for the better.

Smarter recommendations with Google Podcasts

With Google Podcasts, you can listen and subscribe to any podcast, including popular shows like The Daily, Cyrus Says, Modern Love, Lage der Nation, The Bill Simmons Podcast, and literally millions more. Beyond the podcasts you already know, Google Podcasts uses AI to offer recommendations based on your listening habits—such as your interest in sports or true crime, or podcasts from a particular network.

Google Podcasts seamlessly syncs across a variety of Google products, including the Google Assistant. So if you’re listening to a podcast on your phone during your commute home, you can resume it on your Google Home when you arrive. Over time, we’ll integrate Google Podcasts into more places you use Google.

How podcasters can optimize for Google

With Google Podcasts, we’re focused on helping podcast creators reach a broader audience. To ensure inclusion in the Google Podcasts app, creators should follow our updated developer guidelines, which you may already be familiar with for other Google apps. In today’s update, a few new sections cover how to:

• Prompt Google to index new podcasts as quickly as possible
• Generate a direct link to your podcast
• Download the Google Podcasts brand assets for sharing on your website
• Track analytics that come from Google Podcasts

Promoting inclusive storytelling in podcasting

Podcasting holds unbounded promise as a storytelling medium, but its future depends on a rich array of stories, voices and creators. While there are more podcasts than ever before, there continues to be an imbalance in who is creating them. Looking at top charts, only about a quarter of the most popular podcasts tend to be hosted by women, and even fewer by people of color.

That’s why we’re also partnering with the podcast industry on a program to increase the diversity of voices and remove barriers to podcasting. The program will be guided by an advisory board from around the world, with the primary goal of enabling skills development and experimentation from underrepresented voices, as well as cultivating ideas and processes that can scale throughout the industry. We’ll be rolling out more details this summer, and we encourage you to fill out the online form if you are interested.

The future of Google Podcasts

We couldn’t be more excited to help people around the world discover podcasts they’ll love, and this is just the beginning. Looking forward, Google Podcasts will be a launchpad for building an even better podcast listening experience using AI.

For example, as speech-to-text technology continues to improve, we’ll be able to provide new features like automatic subtitling, which is especially helpful if you are hearing impaired or in a noisy area without headphones. Powered by Google Translate, subtitles can then be made available in a wide variety of languages, further improving access to podcasts.

We’re excited about where we’re heading with Google Podcasts. To try out the new experience today, visit the Play store.