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 News and sports bulletins are sometimes hours or days out of date.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.