So in terms of participants, all the fish are already sold, but this is not the case: they still have a huge margin of improvement to comply as one would wish, and Google Assistant, one of the giants, is no exception. If you use it and are a podcast enthusiast, there is good news.

Until now, you could ask Google Assistant to open and play podcast by show title and little else, but it seems to be changing, or rather changing, and that is that several improvements have been added to the service, as reported by 9to5Google, which will delight regular visitors to the medium.

For the record, Google points out that this is a new feature aimed mainly at Android Auto users, but Android is Android, and if you have it, you can use it however you want. But what improvements are we talking about? What parameters are added to the current Google Assistant capabilities?

Specifically, it would be three new filters that can play a lot if they are well combined:

• Search by episode.
• Search by topic.
• Search by guest.

With some example, instead of the current one…:

• “Hey Google, play me X podcast.”

To which the Google Assistant usually responds by opening the last chapter of the program or resuming the reproduction of the last episode you listened to. Now you can do something like this:

• “Hey Google, put on X podcast that talks about Zeta.
• “Hey Google, play me X podcast that Zeta is on.

So, on an abstract level, it is true that everything points to the title of the episode in particular, so basically the change from the planned would be less spectacular than it seems. Even so, it’s a significant improvement over what it was… although, at least in Spanish, It doesn’t work as smoothly as it should… But it workswhich is not little.

Of course, keep in mind that by default Google Assistant will open Google Podcasts and play whatever you ask it to. If you’re using a different client, you’ll need to set it in your Google Assistant preferences to use it as your default.