Extra information, all kept in the video description
Like any Google product, YouTube often experiments with new features, giving users access to incomplete projects to get feedback on what’s next for the world’s largest video sharing platform. The company recently made it a lot easier for anyone to try out these tests — though you have to be a paid Premium subscriber to access them. The latest experiment looks to bring search and videos a little closer, and it’s available for Android users now.
With its new Google Assistant integration, YouTube will automatically suggest results related directly to whatever you’re watching in the app (via 9to5Google). To try it out, grab an Android device running the latest version of YouTube, then scroll to the bottom of a video description. If Google spots additional information worth pulling from the web, you can view a new card with included links.
It’s a neat idea, but the actual usefulness of this seems limited. After all, if you’re really interested in a recent movie release, it takes just as long to perform a Google search as it does to scroll through a video description. And since YouTube works in PIP mode on Android, heading home and opening a search widget doesn’t interrupt the experience anyway. It’s a neat idea, but one that will need some extra functionality to work at its full potential.
If you’re interested — and you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber — head on over to the Experiments page here to try out Assistant integration for yourself. Just remember you can only enable one feature at a time, so if you’re using iOS PIP or the recent desktop downloads tool, Google will swap you from one tool to another.
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