The days of just watching the news are long gone.
Google announced the latest version of its TV operating system on Monday at CES 2025. Summarize the day's biggest news using the company's Gemini AI assistant. When you ask Gemini to play “News Brief,” the AI assistant collects headlines from news articles and YouTube videos from around the internet and from trusted news channels to give you a quick overview of what's going on that day. Create.
Demo of Google's news summary feature Image credit: Maxwell Zeff
Google plans to release these new Gemini features for new and existing Google TV devices towards the end of 2025.
The News Brief feature marks a notable step by Google into AI news briefing, which is risky territory for tech companies to enter these days. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity are currently facing lawsuits from media companies for failing to properly license and credit the news content their AI systems use to create AI summaries.
As more tech companies experiment with AI news summarization, they have to deal with backlash from embarrassing hallucinations. Apple's new AI-generated summary misinterpreted a BBC news article and created a false headline about tennis world champion Rafael Nadal's sexuality. Google is no stranger to such hallucinations either. Its Gemini AI brief hallucinated last year and told users to put glue on a pizza.
Google initially avoided summarizing AI news and instead directed users to Google Search, but it has now loosened its guardrails on Gemini. Today, the AI assistant summarizes news articles, and News Brief appears to be Google's first AI-only news product. Notably, the News Brief does not indicate the source, but the associated YouTube video does. A Google executive told TechCrunch that it pulls information from across the web, not just YouTube video headlines.
In a demo with TechCrunch, Google showed how its News Briefs feature can summarize live news about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau submitting his resignation. In another example, Gemini recapped the events that took place at the Capitol on Monday, including the anniversary of the January 6th Capitol riot.
Gemini recaps Capitol Hill news Image credit: Maxwell Zeff
Google TV's news feature is part of the company's broader vision for how Gemini can change the way people use their TVs. Google aims to make TV a more interactive experience, and its new TVs will be equipped with sensors that will tell when you enter a room.
Google also says users will be able to use natural language to ask their TV to search for shows, movies, and YouTube videos, and Gemini will also create AI summaries of this content.