Announcement: Kaleida awarded Google DNI funding to develop voice-native models for news
We received some great news this week. Google is supporting our project to develop new models for news on voice assistants — Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
These new platforms have a lot of interesting capabilities that news is not yet embracing fully. Much like previous transitions to new media formats most of the experiences today are repurposed.
There are some challenges that everyone in the news business is facing in addition to the basic need to just be present on these platforms. News does not yet have a good model for discovery, exploration or socialising news.
In Nic Newman’s report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism on The Future of Voice he noted that news is a popular feature on voice assistants but that people aren’t really happy with it, yet.
“While around a half [of respondents] have used the news function, only about a quarter are asking for the news on a daily basis and just 1% say it is the most important feature.”
We think the first step is to think of news experiences from a “voice-first” perspective. That’s what this project is about.
Our plan is to develop some of the concepts we’ve been exploring, test them with partners and with news consumers, and share what we learn for the benefit of the wider news ecosystem. Our hope is that this project will help the news category as a whole as these devices increasingly become part of everyone’s every day lives.
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