I’ve spent more time falling YouTube rabbit holes than I’d like to admit, trying to find one specific “quick weeknight dinner” video and ultimately finding it buried under a thousand unrelated recommendations.
At its Made on YouTube event, the platform announced a slew of conversational AI features aimed squarely at fixing that issue. Soon, YouTube will let you build custom homepage feeds, chat your way through specific product research, and get music and podcast recommendations in simple conversations.
So what’s new for browsing and shopping?
To begin with, Custom Feeds will let you build your own YouTube homepage for specific moods or interests, described in plain, simple text. Basically, you can describe your feed in phrases like “evening wind-down documentaries” or “new DIY creators,” and YouTube will recommend only those videos.
The idea is to make sure a viewer isn’t stuck with the algorithm-picked feed for everything and can customize it to their preferences. It’s rolling out to U.S. users across web, mobile, and TV soon.
Ask YouTube also gets a serious conversational upgrade for shopping. You can ask it to compare products, and it’ll surface an organized comparison table pulled from creator reviews on the platform.
You can keep asking follow-up questions on the video’s watch page or by voice if you’re on the TV. It’s going to be a bit hard for me to admit, but that beats opening six tabs to compare a product’s specs.
What about finding new music and podcasts?
Ask Music brings the same conversational approach to YouTube Music’s catalog, which now includes over 300 million songs, plus official tracks, remixes, live sets, covers, and DJ mixes. So, you can rebuild your queue on the fly by describing what you want to hear or asking for deep artist backstory instead of just hitting shuffle.
Another new content discovery feature, Your Podcast Lineup, offers you a spoken AI preview that recommends shows, along with explanations about why you might like them, and queues up episodes, entirely hands-free (and eyes optional).
Both features arrive soon for YouTube Music and Premium subscribers worldwide.
