YouTube Music may get an AI-powered tool to aid music discovery

Summary

• YouTube Music has been spotted working on a new conversational search feature for its Android app.
• YouTube Music has already added some AI-powered features like customized playlist cover art.
• The upcoming “Ask for Music” feature and conversational search will enhance the YouTube Music user experience.

Today, when you explore Google’s services and apps, you’ll discover the pervasive presence of AI. It’s not just a feature, but the very essence of everything Google creates is built upon AI, revolutionizing the company’s app development. As for YouTube Music, the service has been kept away from Google’s AI initiatives, but its AI journey is far from over.

The YouTube Music extension was recently added to Google Gemini, allowing you to access your playlists with ease. Since last year, YouTube Music has also let users create playlist cover art using AI. However, this is just a glimpse of what’s to come, and more AI-powered features are in the pipeline for the streaming app.

As reported by Android Authority, delving into the YouTube Music app for Android (Version 7.06.53) revealed that Google developers are working on a so-called “Ask for Music” feature for the app. As the name implies, the feature could potentially allow users to search for specific music, enhancing the app’s search capabilities.

YouTube Music soon lets you search for music using conversational AI prompts

Meanwhile, YouTube Music recently launched a new song search feature and previously supported voice commands for searching. So, the underdevelopment feature could have different functionality. Given that the related snippets are located in a file named conversational_text_input.xml, the new search feature could insist on a more conversational tone for searches.

The “Conversational” rhetoric might be vague for now. Still, it could come on the heels of Google’s push to add natural language processing to its AI products and humanize AI responses to queries. For example, the upcoming search feature could let users search for a music video by describing the scene, just like when explaining something to a friend. Additionally, it could replace the existing YouTube Music voice search function.

In another string, Google informs users that AI-generated responses are still experimental, and their quality and accuracy might vary. It remains to be seen when the feature lands on the stable YouTube Music app, but the wait should be brief as Google has already shown its agility when it comes to adding AI-powered features to its services.