Google Lets Users Chat Their Way to a Custom Discover Feed

Google is putting a chatbot in charge of your news feed. The company announced on August 20, 2026 a new feature in its official app that lets people reshape their Discover feed simply by describing what they want to see.

Instead of hunting through settings menus, users type or speak requests, telling the AI which topics, formats, or types of stories should show up more often. The system interprets those preferences and adjusts the feed accordingly, then remembers the choice for future sessions rather than resetting each time the app opens.

The new tool sits in the three-dot menu already familiar to Discover users, keeping the entry point close to where people currently manage feed settings. Google began rolling it out gradually inside the official app within days of the announcement, a staged release pattern typical of feed-level changes that touch ranking systems used by a large user base.

Part of a Broader Personalization Push

The Discover update did not arrive alone. Google also refreshed Preferred Sources in Google News, a feature that lets readers see more coverage from outlets they follow directly within Top Stories.

Publishers gain something too: the update allows them to embed an interactive Preferred Sources button on their own websites, giving readers a one-click way to prioritize that outlet in their Google News results going forward. That turns a passive ranking signal into something publishers can actively promote to their audience.

On Android, Google News picked up personalization for its daily audio summaries as well. Users can now specify which topics they want covered when the app generates spoken news briefings, extending the same "tell it what you want" logic from text feeds into audio.

Taken together, the three changes point to a consistent design choice: rather than building ever more granular manual controls, Google is routing personalization through natural-language input across its content surfaces. For a company whose Discover feed and News product reach billions of devices, a conversational settings layer changes how directly user intent can shape what algorithms decide to show, without requiring anyone to learn a new interface.