Google TV’s home screen is notoriously busy. It’s crammed with content recommendations; getting to the streaming app you’re looking for means scrolling past digital billboards for shows, movies, and even other products like video games. Some of these suggestions are at least nominally tuned to your preferences, but many of them are brazen advertisements. The amount of recommended crud on Google TV’s home screen is my least favorite thing about the operating system, and it was my biggest complaint in reviewing last year’s Google TV Streamer.
Last week, Google debuted a new home screen complication for some users: a News Brief section on Google TV’s For You page, with Gemini-generated summaries of news stories and links to relevant YouTube videos. The feature seems like a fine addition for users who want it — but I’m not one of them, and I’m really hoping News Brief doesn’t turn into another mandatory Google TV fixture.
Related
Review: The Google TV Streamer is a better Chromecast, but not much more
At twice the price of Google’s last 4K streamer, I expected better
More Google TV bloat?
The experimental News Brief feature sounds a lot like part of the new Google TV features teased at CES earlier this month. In one portion of a demo I attended dedicated to Google TV getting more Gemini-powered features, a Google rep asked a microphone-equipped TCL set running Google TV to show the news. It pulled up a news brief: a selection of news stories distilled down to short text summaries, each with a carousel of links to relevant YouTube videos from various news outlets. The demo also showed off a news brief widget on a new, customizable ambient mode screen, alongside widgets for a calendar, the weather, and more.
It’s hard to know if this News Brief is exactly the same — I kept an eye out for it on my Google TV Streamer over the weekend and it never showed. The experiment was announced in a post on the Google TV Help forum last week, which didn’t include visuals or go into specifics about the UX. But given what I’ve heard about each, I’m guessing they’re variations on the same feature.
Related
The next generation of Google TVs will let you talk to Gemini without a remote
Far-field mics and a new widget hub announced at CES
The forum post does specify that News Briefs are made using “Gemini models and human evaluation” — presumably meaning that Gemini whips up the news summaries, then a human checks Gemini’s work to make sure it’s not misrepresenting anything or outright making stuff up. The human oversight is a good call: we know AI is liable to hallucinate. Earlier this month, Apple had to disable notification summaries from news and entertainment apps after people noticed the company’s AI creating believable but false summaries of high-profile news stories.
The human component of News Briefs makes me wonder how important to the whole process Gemini really is — if people are checking these news summaries, those same people could probably be writing them. But even with assurances that these briefs won’t push AI-garbled misinformation to my TV screen, I’m still not interested in seeing them.
News is absolutely everywhere; anyone with access to the internet is liable to be exposed to headlines whether they want to be or not. Something like 86 percent of adults in the US consume some news on digital devices already. More than half say they do “often.”
For anyone looking for yet more ways to stay on top of the news, Google TV’s News Briefs might be an appealing proposition. But I think AP’s Chris Thomas hit the nail on the head in a comment on our post covering the news about this feature rolling out:
isnt it fascinating society went from “network TV is literally the only existing way to get breaking news” all the way to “dear god i can’t handle any more headlines, keep them off my TV” lol
I’m not saying I want to completely insulate myself from the news, just that I think I’m good on that front even without a News Brief popping up on my Google TV Streamer. I don’t typically consider catching up on world events to be the type of leisure experience I’m looking for when I sit down in front of my TV; there aren’t many things I’d want to see less when I plop down on the couch at the end of a long day than a slideshow of AI-summarized news stories about international conflicts and natural disasters.
It all comes down to implementation
I might be getting worked up over nothing here. These new News Briefs are an experiment, after all, and they don’t seem to be a particularly widespread one: I haven’t seen them on my own TV yet, and searching the internet for impressions from users who have experienced the new feature hasn’t turned anything up. It’s entirely possible Google will decide News Briefs aren’t a feature worth implementing on a wider scale.
But given Google’s tendency to pack as much into Google TV’s home screen as possible, I’m worried I might be scrolling past AI-summarized headlines to get to Netflix in the near future, and I’m not excited about the prospect. News Brief ought to be an opt-in feature, but at the very least, I’m going to need an option to opt out — otherwise, I’ll be looking for a new streaming box.