We have used web 2 social apps like YouTube the same way for years: We type what we want to see or watch then wait to see the best guesses. It has gotten way better over time but well, Google wants to change all that.
Apparently, Google is testing a new feature called Ask YouTube. This is an opt-in feature for YouTube Premium subscribers in the US only available on desktop to people over 18 and in the English Language.
So how does Ask YouTube work? Well, you need to enable it in your account via here, and once it is on, the “Ask YouTube” button appears next to the search bar. When you type a question on the search bar, instead of the usual standard list of videos we are used to, you get a text summary, a featured video linked to a specific timestamp and galleries of long form videos.
This in my opinion is a crazy way of using conversional AI to make YouTube Search more meaningful. This feels like what Google has been doing with AI Mode on Google Search which allows you to query it further to refine your search. This sort of experience on YouTube would make sense to further get the right kind of information or better, get various stitched up information that is relevant to you.
The sad thing is that this test ends on June 8th and it is limited to the US. I am a Premium user, and I would love to see how well it works, since I use YouTube a lot for recreational use. If this ends up being the default, then YouTube creators will have to know that keyword driven search will be made outdated with this feature.
I see this feature being deployed soon because Google does not want to be left out of the AI race. They have been doing some incredible things with AI (Nano Banana for example), so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was announced next year.
