What you need to know
- YouTube announced the roll out of a new experimental feature: AI-powered search results carousel for Premium users.
- When searching on YouTube, some queries may return a “Highlight” with AI-generated titles, descriptions, and clips that should help find your answer.
- This test is arriving on Android and iOS only, and lasts until July 30.
- YouTube adds that it’s also extending its conversational AI test to some non-Premium users.
YouTube is in the process of rolling out a new AI-powered feature for its subscribers that will surely look familiar.
Announced in a blog post, YouTube states its Premium subscribers will soon notice the platform’s new AI-powered carousel in search results. The post states this new carousel will contain suggested “videos and topic descriptions” based on your query. It’s also good to note that not every query will return this AI-powered highlight (kind of like something more Google-related).
In its Short, YouTube states Premium users need only pose a query to the platform, like “best beaches in Hawaii.”
The carousel will be marked by Google’s classic AI star with “Highlights” as its title. Beneath that, users will find a highlighted video clip, as well as several subsequent video thumbnails that will help enhance the information. Users can tap on these thumbnails to see a short clip play; however, tapping the clips opens the video in full on that creator’s channel.
More than that, every clip is given its own AI-generated title and description. These should be relevant to your query, with YouTube stating these descriptions will “show how it matches your search.” Ideally, these text boxes should hold useful insights about places you’re interested in seeing or products. It’s a good rule of thumb to remember that features like this can slip up at times, so be wary of that.
YouTube gets some AI lovin’
YouTube adds that this AI search results carousel is running from today (June 26) to July 30 for Premium users. However, you’ll only be able to try this out on your Android or iOS mobile device.
The platform also highlighted that it’s expanding its conversational AI test to some non-Premium users in the U.S.
Setting that aside for now, YouTube’s AI search results carousel is highly reminiscent of Google’s AI Overviews. Each is designed to give quick, bite-sized information to users depending on the query, as the AI can’t fulfill everything with an overview. On one hand, it seems like a no-brainer that Google would bring some of its AI into YouTube, like AI Overviews. Either way, YouTube’s been going down this AI road for a while now, slowly but surely.
That conversational AI test for Premium users kicked off late in 2023. YouTube placed a new “Ask” button alongside the thumbs up/down buttons under videos. Users would see a few suggested actions, like “Summarize the video,” “tell me more about the topic,” and “recommend related content.” As always, users retain their ability to write their own questions about the video with the AI. YouTube has also started venturing into AI-generated music, too, for Shorts creation.
