Google assistant’s “Tell Me a Story” is a story telling feature of Google Home smart speaker which Google has brought to Android and iPhones through Google Assistant on the occasion of National Tell a Story day on April 27. This feature was first introduced in 2018 but it’s made available only now on Google Home devices. Google is taking a serious approach towards Assistant as last month, Google added free YouTube music to Google home devices.
In the month of October last year, Google teamed up with Disney and Penguin Random House to develop a feature called “Read Along”. This feature automatically plays sound effects to the stories you read from select Disney Little Golden Books like Coco, The Three Little Pigs, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Toy Story-3. You just need to say “Hey Google, let’s read along with Disney” and the speakers will play the sound effects to key points in the story.
There is also an inspiring book “Ara the Star Engineer” for young girls to explore the wonders of STEM illuminating the motives like courage, creativity, coding, and collaboration. Over 20 stories including the classic bedtime stories such as Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and other family favourite stories such as Goldilocks, The Tired Alien, The Chef Who Loved Potatoes, The Cats Elopement, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Blaze and The Monster Machines are available on Google Assistant.
Few of the family favourite books are available for download:
There are options to pause, resume or skip the audiobooks through the voice assistant. Just say “Hey Google, read my book” and you can resume from where you left. To skip to the next chapter just say “Hey Google, skip to the next chapter” and Google will read you the next chapter.
Although the selection of supported books remains limited for now. If you have a good collection of Google play books then you can simply ask Google to read the book with a specific title “Hey Google, read Sleeping Beauty”.
However, Google is not the only one offering audiobooks and narrated stories to kids. Amazon’s Alexa assistant can play audiobooks as well as books without professional narration when connected to Kindle or audible accounts. Amazon has announced last year to make more than 1,000 kid friendly titles available through its free time unlimited program where parents need to pay around $2.99 per month.
Audiobooks are available on the Google assistant in English in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan.