Google Play Books Can Now Read Stories To Young Kids

Google has added new features to its Play Books platform, ones aimed at young kids who may not yet know how to read or who may have limited reading skills. In addition to a new read-and-listen feature, the app also now offers a kid-friendly dictionary to help young readers learn new vocabulary while reading stories.

Google Play Books is a platform that provides users with access to ebooks and audiobooks, including ones for kids. When it comes to the youngest readers, they may not yet have the reading skills necessary to read a book, but also not be interested in audiobooks due to the lack of illustrations.

In a new update, Google has announced that Google Play Books can now read stories to kids; the app can be set to automatically turn the pages or allow the reader to manually flip to new pages. The tool shows the text on the page and highlights each word as it is read, helping readers learn to read themselves.

In addition to the read-and-listen feature, the update also adds a kid-friendly dictionary that shows the definition for words, as well as reading the definition. According to Google, this dictionary has child-appropriate definitions for thousands of words.

Most of the books for readers ages 0 to 8 available on the Google Play Books platform support these new features. Users can download free samples of the titles to get a preview of the content and features before purchase. Select free titles also offer these features, including Ara the Star Engineer, Family Forever, and We're Amazing, 1-2-3.