YouTube Music is looking for new ways to bring AI to its music streaming service, unveiling a trivia and commentary feature when listening to music, which gives facts and stories about the track or artist.
This feature, announced on September 26 by YouTube Labs Vice President Aparna Pappu, is part of YouTube’s new AI testing plan, slowly rolling out new features if they prove successful.
How to sign up
The new trivia feature is part of a new project called YouTube Labs. This is a way for users to test out new AI experiments made by YouTube. It will first be made available to a limited number of US-based participants. You can sign up to join the waiting list, but you need to have a YouTube Premium account.
YouTube hasn’t released much information on this new feature yet, simply stating, “The first experiment, AI music hosts designed to deepen your listening experience by sharing relevant stories, fan trivia, and fun commentary about your favorite music on the YouTube Music app, is now live.”
This is similar to Google’s Lab feature, where users can test out new features before they are rolled out to the public. For Google, this has involved games, AI music generators, and more. Other than this first trivia feature, it is unclear what other kinds of tools YouTube will roll out via its new lab.
YouTube also announced that some of its Premium exclusive features would be expanding to new platforms. This includes the jump ahead feature, which utilizes AI to skip to the most interesting part of a video.
How does YouTube Music compare to Spotify for AI?
This isn’t the first AI feature we’ve seen come to music streaming. Spotify has been offering its AI DJ feature for over two years, where a virtual DJ picks tracks for you and explains why each song has been picked.
Spotify also unveiled an AI Playlist tool last year. This allows you to turn any idea into a personalized playlist via generative AI. This is done via prompts. For example, asking Spotify to generate a “Summer evening playlist for sitting out in the garden with friends”.
YouTube has been slowly unveiling different AI features, including the introduction of a conversational AI tool that lets users create custom radio stations by simply describing what they want to hear.
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