In June of 2018, Google belatedly and finally launched its own podcast app called, of course, Google Podcasts. It was initially meant for mobile devices and eventually for Google Assistant devices like smart speakers. But they eventually realized that those who are using their desktops also listen to podcasts while they’re working or studying and may not have access to their phones. So now they are rolling out a web version so you can listen to your favorite podcasts on your computer or laptop on your browser.

If you search for a specific podcast on google.com, you will find a list of the most recent episodes. Tap on an episode and you will be redirected to podcasts.google.com. It will look similar to the Android app and you get play and pause controls as well as a rewind 10 seconds and forward 30 seconds option. Of course it’s optimized for a bigger screen but you still get similar functionalities.

You don’t need to sign in to your Google account to start listening, but if you want to be able to continue where you left off across your other devices, you will need to sign in to the same account that you use on your other devices. However, there isn’t really any homepage where you can see all the ones that you subscribe to. You will only be able to access the podcasts through the Google Search results.

CEO Sundar Pichai also announced during the Google I/O conference that podcasts will be part of the search results later this year. They will be indexing the content of the podcasts and not just the titles so that the relevant ones to the topic you’r searching for will appear in the results. This will be good for podcast discoverability as well as enhance your search results.

The podcasts on desktop is now rolling out to selected devices and will eventually be available to all browsers.

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