You can now use Google Assistant to listen to audiobooks

Google is making it a lot easier to listen to audiobooks.

Today the company is launching a dedicated audiobook service that integrates Google Assistant directly into audiobooks. Available as part of Google Play Books' ebook offering, the audiobooks are available on iOS and Android, as well as Google Home, Android Wear, and Android Auto.

Google may be entering the space late compared with players like Amazon-owned Audible, but the company is hoping its prices and lack of a subscription tier will help the company compete with more established players.

Prices vary, but many popular books are available for well under $9.99. And, unlike Audible, Google isn't asking users to buy into any kind of a subscription service to listen to the books.

There are also a few other advantages that come with, well, being Google. The audiobook service's launch coincides with the rising popularity of Google Home and Google Assistant, for one. Considering that more and more people are interacting with Google services via voice commands, audiobooks are one area the company expects to see more demand, explains Google Play Books Head of Product Management Greg Hartrell.

Adding Google Assistant to the mix only makes things that much more appealing. Not only can you ask Google Assistant to start reading your book, you can do things like set a sleep timer or get more information about a particular author.

The company is also putting its machine learning smarts to work to make the listening experience smoother. While most audiobooks are broken up into long tracks that may or may not correspond with a book's actual chapters, Google's analyzed the audio behind each of its books so that tracks titles will be consistent with a book's table of contents.

That may sound like a small feature, but it could have big implications. Combining Google's machine learning with its audiobooks opens up many other interesting possibilities, particularly when you start thinking about audiobooks in the context of Google Assistant. It's not difficult to imagine, for example, eventually being able to say something like "Okay Google, skip to the part of Hamlet where he says 'to be, or not to be.'"

"This is really only the beginning," Hartrell says.

So while it's still early days for the service, Google is already proving just how big of a difference its AI smarts can make.

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