YouTube has announced a major set of new features designed to change how people discover, watch and create videos on the platform.
The updates were announced at the annual Made on YouTube 2026 event. Many of the new tools use artificial intelligence to provide more personalised recommendations and make video creation easier.
One of the biggest updates is an expansion of Ask YouTube, the platform’s conversational AI tool. Users can ask questions while watching videos and receive answers related to the content.
Ask YouTube will also become more useful for shopping. Users will be able to ask about products and receive organised recommendations and comparison information.
Users will also be able to interact with Ask YouTube using voice commands on TVs.
Custom feeds will personalise the homepage
YouTube is also introducing Custom Feeds, allowing users to create separate homepage feeds based on their interests, routines or mood.
Users can simply describe what they want to watch through a text prompt.
Multiple custom feeds can be saved and will automatically update with fresh recommendations. The feature will initially become available to users in the United States across web, mobile and TVs.
YouTube is also making Shorts easier to follow by allowing creators to organise them into seasons and episodes.
New AI tools for YouTube creators
Creators are also getting new AI-powered production tools.
A Gemini conversational editing assistant is being added to Shorts and the YouTube Create app. Creators will be able to describe editing changes through prompts. The tool can trim clips, remove pauses, reorder footage and synchronise music with videos. Creators can still manually edit their videos whenever they want.
YouTube is also testing AI-powered comment moderation that can adapt to a creator’s preferred moderation style.
Protection against AI impersonation is being expanded as well. YouTube plans to combine facial likeness detection with speaking-voice detection to help creators identify unauthorised synthetic copies of themselves.
YouTube has announced real-time automatic dubbing to help viewers watch creators in different languages for livestreams. The company says some experimental features will initially launch through smaller pilot programmes before becoming more widely available.