Chrome’s “Listen to this page” replaces yet another Google Assistant feature

I remember it like it was yesterday. A new Google Assistant feature had rolled out in 2020 that allowed users to simply ask for a page to be read aloud to them and promptly delivered a very human-like recitation of that page’s content. It had a playback menu, voice options and everything, and I was pretty blown away.

For those that have low vision or simply don’t do well with larger text comprehension, this was pretty sweet. But it also felt like it turned any post on the web into a tiny audio book of sorts, and I’d imagine a lot of people have found tons of useful ways to leverage it in the time since.

Then last year, Google began testing a very similar feature in Chrome – not attached to the Google Assistant – and at the time it seemed quite strange. With all the moving and shaking going on in the AI world by that point, however, it now seems clear that Google fully understood the demise of the Google Assistant was near, and were getting some of the most helpful features out of it before Gemini came to take over.

“Listen to this page” is rolling out

It’s been months since that initial Read Aloud feature surfaced behind a flag in Chrome for Android, and it seems Google is finally ready to roll out this feature to the masses. It does all the stuff you are likely used to by this point, but it doesn’t need Google Assistant or Gemini to step in and do the heavy lifting: it’s just baked into Chrome, now. And if you aren’t yet seeing it, simply go the chrome://flags/#read-aloud to enable the flag.

The interface is simple and understandable, and you have the option of a handful of voices, skip forward/back, and playback speed controls as well. It works quite well and can even highlight the words on screen as it reads aloud to you.

To get started, simply hit the 3-dot menu up top in Chrome and select Listen to this page from the menu. And if you want to take things a bit further, you can go into settings and under the advanced section, choose to set your toolbar shortcut to this new read aloud option for quick access next to your URL bar in the future.

Google Assistant on the way out

We thought for a while that the Google Assistant was set to get upgraded via some smart injections from Bard, but it feels like Google has now shifted completely away from that idea. While Gemini is the latest AI darling from Google, the Assistant is slowly fading into the background.

Moves like this one that take a big feature away from the Assistant and simply build it into the primary app you would use it in make a lot of sense, but it is definitely telling. And with each move in this sort of direction, it feels like the Google Assistant – once the biggest thing Google talked about – is simply falling into irrelevance. It was a good run, I guess, but it’s on to new AI things for now.