Long gone are the days of simply watching the news.
Google unveiled the latest version of its TV operating system at CES 2025 on Monday. It uses the company’s Gemini AI assistant to summarize the biggest news of the day for you. By asking Gemini to play your “News Brief,” the AI assistant will scrape news stories from across the internet and YouTube video headlines posted by trusted news channels, and produce a brief summary to catch you up on the day’s events.
Google plans to release these new Gemini capabilities for new and existing Google TV devices toward the end of 2025.
The News Brief feature marks a notable step from Google into AI news summaries, a treacherous space for tech companies to venture into these days. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity are currently facing lawsuits from media companies who claim their AI systems have failed to appropriately license and credit the news content they use to create these AI summaries.
As more tech companies try out AI news summaries, they have to deal with the backlash from embarrassing hallucinations. Apple’s new AI-generated summaries misunderstood a BBC news article, creating a false headline about tennis world champion Rafael Nadal’s sexuality. Google is no stranger to these hallucinations, either; its Gemini AI overviews hallucinated last year and told users to put glue on their pizza.
While Google shied away from AI news summaries at first, pushing users toward Google Search instead, the company is now loosening its guardrails on Gemini. The AI assistant will summarize news stories today, but News Brief appears to be Google’s first dedicated AI news product. Notably, News Brief did not show the source of where it gets its information from, but it does show related YouTube videos. A Google executive told TechCrunch it’s pulling the information from not just YouTube video headlines, but across the web.
In a demo with TechCrunch, Google showed how the News Brief feature could summarize live news about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau submitting his resignation. In another example, Gemini summarized events happening on Capitol Hill on Monday, including the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot.
The news feature for Google TV is part of the company’s broader vision for how Gemini can change the way people use their TVs. Google aims to make the TV a more interactive experience, and its new TVs will include sensors to tell when users are entering the room.
Google also says users will be able to ask their TV sets in natural language to search for shows, movies, and YouTube videos, and Gemini will create AI summaries for this content as well.
