Google Expands its AI Overviews to YouTube App, Starting with U.S. Premium
Google-owned YouTube started testing a new “AI-powered search results carousel” to help users find what they are looking for faster.
The new feature is only available on the mobile apps (iOS and Android) and only in English. Only a small, randomly selected group of YouTube Premium members in the United States who opt in through the YouTube Labs page will have access to this new feature.
The new AI carousel will appear at the very top of the search page when users look for topics in shopping, travel, or “things to do” and replace the usual top-ranking videos.
The banner fills almost the entire screen. At the top, a “hero” clip plays with smaller thumbnails sitting beneath it. The AI scans all existing content and picks the single clip it thinks answers your question best, which is placed as the “hero” clip.
The smaller thumbnails underneath are additional real videos that the AI has ranked just behind the hero clip. Each thumbnail can point to either a different moment of the same video or a portion from entirely different videos that also match the query.
The AI-powered search carousel does not generate videos on its own. The only AI-generated elements of this carousel are the AI-written paragraphs under the videos that answer the question in plain English.
In addition to the new AI search results carousel, YouTube has also broadened its “Ask this video” conversational chatbot.
The “Ask this video” chatbot first appeared on November 6, 2023, as an opt-in experiment for the U.S. premium subscribers. It aimed at explaining or expanding on whatever is playing without making the user leave the watch page, like clarifying unfamiliar terms or locations mentioned in the clip.
Back then, it showed a small Ask button under a handful of select English-language videos and let viewers type free-form questions or tap suggested prompts. The replies came from Google’s large-language-model stack and could also surface follow-up links or create mini-quizzes based on the material.
With the June 26 updates, YouTube widened the “Ask this video” to some non-premium users in the U.S. as well. The test group is larger than the AI-powered search results carousel group, but it is limited to English-only content on Android, iOS, and desktop web devices, with a focus on videos where YouTube highlights “academic learning.”
Google switched the experiment on in the U.S. on 26 June, and the test will stay live until July 30. After that, engineers will study watch-time and feedback before deciding whether to expand the carousel, tweak it, or scrap it.
Nothing is planned so far for other languages, countries, nor is a web version, but past Labs projects that show strong engagement usually progress to wider roll-outs within a few months.