Google launches Listen app exclusively for Android

By now Google Android was making us yawn: capacitive display but no multi-touch? Come on! But when we saw this one, our jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there…

Wow, it looks Google has found a way to provide unique selling points (USPs) to Android powered smartphones: the Listen app (and service!) is available only for Android:

Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device. It lets you search, subscribe, download and stream. By subscribing to programs and search terms it will create a personalized audio-magazine loaded with fresh shows and news stories whenever you listen. In this release Listen is indexing thousands of popular English-only audio sources.

To learn more, visit listen.googlelabs.com.

Commentary: by now everybody was expecting that Google will introduce AdSense-like ads also for audio (podcasts!) so that people could commercialize this form of media too. It has not happened. Now that Google has this technology – to voice-recognize audio files – and thus to provide context-based audio-advetisements, then everything can change! It is strange that Google offers access to this audio-search only through their own app and only for Android, but it is understantable…

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