Barely two months after Google launched a standalone podcast player for Android, The Verge has discovered that the search giant is already working on another app for spoken-word audio.
It’s called Shortwave, and it’s being built at the company’s Area 120 incubator, which helps employees’ ideas bloom into full-blown products.
The project was revealed in a trademark filing; Google told The Verge that the idea behind the app is to “help users discover and consume spoken-word audio in new ways.”
It’ll be interesting to see what Google comes up with. Its own podcast app already plays nice with the company’s Assistant and runs on its wireless hardware in addition to Android devices. That effort followed an update to Assistant, which let people curate and listen to podcasts on their phones without having to install another app.
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There’s also competition in the form of Anchor, which encourages on-the-fly short form podcast creation and listening on mobile, and NPR recently acquired the award-winning Pocket Casts app to “improve podcasts discovery experience for listeners and to connect producers with new audiences.”
We’re keeping an ear to the ground to learn more, but it might be a while – Google said that the project is in its early stages and doesn’t yet have any additional details to share at this time.
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