Ever since the launch of Google Assistant in 2016, Google has received billions of voice queries regarding subjects ranging from the weather to education to food and news. Since billions of users across the world consume latest news everyday, Google has collaborated and launched “speakable” as a beta version. This new schema.org structured data specification
Ever since the launch of Google Assistant in 2016, Google has received billions of voice queries regarding subjects ranging from the weather to education to food and news.
Since billions of users across the world consume latest news everyday, Google has collaborated and launched “speakable” as a beta version.
This new schema.org structured data specification called speakable helps the publishers mark up the specific and most relevant sections of a news article. This helps the publishers in indicating that these marked up sections are the most relevant to the query and should be read aloud by Google Assistant.
For example, when people ask the Google Assistance, “Hey Google, what’s the update on the USA immigrant law and crisis?”, the Google Assistant will respond with a relevant excerpt from a latest, relevant news article while also reading aloud the name of the publisher or news organization.
After this, Google Assistance will also ask the user if they’d like to hear more news on the same subject and send more relevant links to the user’s smartphone.
Now, news publishers should focus on how they can use this new schema.org Speakable markup to their advantage. The feature has been made available for the English language users in USA and Google is working on to make Speakable launch in other languages and countries.
How does “Speakable” schema.org property work?
Speakable schema.org property works by determining certain areas in a news article (posted on a webpage) that are the best fit for audio playback through TTS (text-to-speech).
When you add this markup to your news articles, it will be easy for search engines to determine the content that can be read aloud on devices with Google Assistant.
Moreover, webpages using speakable structured data will be able to use Google Assistant better to distribute their content widely and find wider audience, eventually leading to a higher traffic.
When Google gets a query from users regarding a specific topic, the Google Assistance turns up to around 3 articles from the entire web and supports audio response through TTS. Speakable structured data makes this job much easier for Google Assistant and can really help news publishers find more traffic.
By informing the user of the source of the article excerpt that Google Assistant reads aloud, it helps promote the publisher. Moreover, it also sends the full link to the excerpt news article to the user’s mobile phone.
As of now, the feature is in a beta version and Google is working on it to make it better and more effective for global users speaking varying languages.