YouTube Will Build a Feed From Your Description

Your YouTube homepage is a guess. Most days it's a good one, built out of everything you've watched, skipped, and let autoplay through at one in the morning. It is still YouTube deciding what you're in the mood for, though, and soon you'll be able to tell it directly instead.

That's the headline feature in a batch YouTube announced today. Custom feeds let you describe what you want in a conversational prompt, and YouTube builds a tab for it. The examples run to a feed for workouts, one for long documentaries, and one that surfaces new creators in a niche you care about. It's coming to web, mobile and TV, in the US first, and the only timing attached to it was "soon."

A feed you write yourself has to beat one that already knows you

When you know exactly what you want, this should be great. Sunday morning, ninety minutes of documentary and nothing else, and typing that beats scrolling past six thumbnails for a phone you already bought. Recommendations are good at the middle of your taste and worse at the edges. A feed you write yourself aims straight at the edges.

Most of the time, though, you don't know what you want. That's the whole reason the homepage works in the first place. A custom feed is also just another tab, competing with the one you open by reflex. I'd like to be wrong about this, but the version that wins is the one you remember exists on a Tuesday night.

Shorts can now be organized into episodes

Further down the list, creators get to organize Shorts episodically, with custom thumbnails and sequential playback. YouTube framed it around microdrama viewers who want to keep track of which episode they're on.

Sequential playback and episode thumbnails are what separate a series from a pile of clips. If you've been making serialized Shorts and watching people land on part four with no idea there were three before it, this is the fix. It also gives a Shorts channel a back catalog someone can work through.

The GIFs, and everything else

YouTube is adding a searchable GIF library to video comments, globally, on the mobile app, this fall. That's the entire feature. It's fun, it will make comment sections louder, and it is not going to change anyone's week. Not everything has to.

Ask YouTube, the shopping-oriented chatbot, now handles product reviews, comparison tables, and questions about items that show up in a video. YouTube Music gets two additions: Ask Music, which answers questions about artists, and Podcast Lineup, an AI-generated weekly preview of shows. Both go to Premium and Music subscribers worldwide.

The rest comes with firmer dates. YouTube extended its Coachella streaming rights through 2030. Live auto-dubbing begins as a pilot in early 2027, English and Spanish first. Voice-to-speech commenting is now in the TV app, which is either a nice accessibility win or the start of comment sections read aloud in your living room.

Custom feeds and GIFs are the two most people will care about, and YouTube dated them "soon" and "this fall." You'll know the feed shipped when a new tab turns up on your homepage.