You Tube promises custom feeds and a lot more AI later this year - Ars Technica

Overview

You Tube promises custom feeds and a lot more AI later this year

You Tube’s next year could change the content you see with a big focus on AI and live streams.

Details

The annual Made on You Tube event has just wrapped up, offering an early look at the features you can expect to come to Google’s dominant online streaming platform in the coming months. Yes, there’s plenty of AI for both viewers and creators, but there’s also a handful of non-AI updates mixed in there, too.

The makeup of You Tube’s homepage feed comes under fire often, but the platform is preparing to give you more options. With Custom Feeds, you’ll be able to add new tabs to the You Tube interface with content of your choice. To create a feed, just type a description and let You Tube populate the page. You can refine your description and rate video suggestions to tune the Custom Feed. Google says you’ll be able to save “multiple” feeds without specifying the exact number. This feature will roll out soon in the US for web, mobile, and TV users.

Interacting on You Tube will also change later this year. The platform will finally add the option to post GIFs in comments, which has apparently been a common request for some time. The comment box will let you search for popular animated thumbnails and post them on both regular videos and You Tube Shorts. The You Tube direct messaging feature is also adding support for group chat, but it’s only going to be available in the US, UK, Singapore, Brazil, and some European countries to start.

Credit: Google

You Tube is probably going to nudge you to chat with a robot more often, too. The AI-powered Ask You Tube feature is not new, but it’s getting several new features that will make it more prominent across the platform. The AI will take on a conversational role in product review videos, allowing you to type or use voice commands to get more information about a product. In search, Ask You Tube may offer organized video recommendations and product comparison tables, too.

The music version of this AI is also expanding. Ask Music is getting more prominent placement in the You Tube Music app, right at the top where search used to be (it recently moved to a tab at the bottom). Ask Music can create or edit playlists and tell you about an artist. It will also surface suggestions throughout the app, like when you’re creating a mix.

You Tube also promises an AI-powered “Your Podcast Lineup” feature in the coming months. This is a weekly spoken preview of recommended podcasts available through You Tube Music. These AI features are limited to You Tube Music subscribers and will begin rolling out later this year.

According to Google, You Tube creators are very invested in AI tools. The company claims that a large majority of US video posters have used AI to create or edit content in the past year. You Tube will give them even more opportunities to use AI with a new Gemini-based conversational editing feature in the You Tube Create app. After cutting together different versions of a video with AI, expanded A/B testing will let creators run up to three different versions to find the one that gets the most engagement.

A new tool called Ask Studio can also help with recommendations for things like pacing, framing, and thumbnails. It will even generate those thumbnails using AI. This tool can run in the background to analyze older videos and suggest ways to boost them for more views.

The content you see on You Tube may also change thanks to some new creator features. You Tube previously rolled out the option for two different creators to share a single live stream. Early next year, You Tube will use live matchmaking to merge streams from people who might not even know each other.

Credit: Google

These shared streams will connect to a new feature called Live Showdown, which is billed as an interactive audience experience. Streamers will compete with a live leaderboard to see who can get the most chats, gifts, and Super Chats. So whoever gets viewers to spend the most money “wins,” essentially. Someone in this equation is probably losing, but it’s not the streamers.

The last creator update could make more content accessible to you on You Tube. The company says 40 percent of live watch time comes from viewers outside the creator’s home country. You Tube will support this trend with live autodubbing. Starting early next year, video makers will be able to enable real-time translation of their streams so viewers in other countries will be able to watch live in their preferred language. You Tube didn’t specify how this will work behind the scenes, but Google did recently release an improved Gemini translation model. So autodubbing will probably use some version of that.

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Key Takeaways

You Tube promises custom feeds and a lot more AI later this year
You Tube’s next year could change the content you see with a big focus on AI and live streams
The annual Made on You Tube event has just wrapped up, offering an early look at the features you can expect to come to Google’s dominant online streaming platform in the coming months
The makeup of You Tube’s homepage feed comes under fire often, but the platform is preparing to give you more options
Interacting on You Tube will also change later this year