Gone are the days of just watching the news.
Google has unveiled the latest version of its TV operating system Monday at CES 2025. using it The company's Gemini AI assistant To summarize the biggest news of the day for you. Ask Gemini to run your “news brief,” the AI assistant will scrape news stories across the Internet and YouTube video headlines posted by trusted news channels and create a brief summary to catch you up on the day's events.
Google plans to release these new Gemini capabilities to new and existing Google TV devices by the end of 2025.
The News Brief feature marks a significant move by Google into AI news summaries, which is a treacherous place for tech companies these days. OpenAI, Microsoft, And Confusion Currently facing lawsuits from media companies who claim their AI systems fail to properly license and credit the news content they use to generate these AI summaries.
As more tech companies try to sum up AI news, they'll have to deal with backlash from embarrassing hallucinations. Apple's new AI-generated summary misunderstands a BBC news article, Making false headlines about tennis world champion Rafael Nadal's sexuality. Google is no stranger to this hallucination, either; Its Gemini AI overview last year hallucinated and Asks users to put glue on a pizza.
While Google initially shied away from AI news summaries, instead pushing users to Google Search, the company is now loosening its grip on Gemini. The AI assistant will provide news briefs today, but News Brief appears to be Google's first dedicated AI news product. Notably, the news brief does not show the source of where it gets its information, but it does show related YouTube videos. A Google executive told TechCrunch that it's pulling information from the entire web, not just YouTube video titles.
In a demo with TechCrunch, Google showed how the News Brief feature can summarize live news Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has submitted his resignation letter. In another instance, Gemini recaps events on Capitol Hill on Monday, including the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
The news feature for Google TV is part of the company's larger 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 include sensors to let users know when they enter a room.
Google also said users will be able to ask their TV sets to search for shows, movies and YouTube videos in natural language, and Gemini will also create AI summaries for this content.