Video streaming platform YouTube is giving artificial intelligence a bigger role in enhancing the viewer experience. The video-sharing platform is currently testing three new AI-powered features aimed at making it easier to navigate lengthy videos, engage with comments, and learn from educational content.

This experimental feature analyses how people watch videos to identify the most compelling segments automatically. When you double-tap the screen to skip ahead, a button will appear, allowing you to jump straight to a highlighted section determined by AI as potentially interesting.

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.

Since the development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been demonstrated that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasks—such as discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess—with great proficiency.

For now, this AI video navigation tool is only available to a limited number of YouTube Premium subscribers in the US. However, it could eventually become a game-changer for those seeking a more efficient viewing experience.

YouTube gets big AI upgradeAnother AI test involves organising comments on lengthy videos into themes and topics. This tool gives creators a bird’s eye view of what their audience is discussing, making it easier to join conversations or generate new content ideas based on viewer feedback.

If you’re part of the experiment, you’ll notice a “Sort by Topics” option in the comment section on eligible videos. Creators can then browse through AI-generated comment summaries, removing unwanted topics by deleting associated comments.

The AI aims to foster a more interactive and educational viewing experience. While watching a video, viewers can tap an “Ask” button to access a conversational AI tool that provides answers, quizzes, and related content recommendations without interrupting playback.

For academic videos, this AI assistant can even guide users through a learning journey by offering quizzes and responses designed to deepen their understanding of the subject matter. None of these AI capabilities are publicly available but Premium members can already opt-in to test some of these features.

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, since which it operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

YouTube allows users to upload videos, view them, rate them with likes and dislikes, share them, add videos to playlists, report, make comments on videos, and subscribe to other users. The slogan Broadcast Yourself used for several years and the reference to user profiles as ‘Channels’ signifies the premise upon which the platform is based, of allowing anyone to operate a personal broadcasting station in resemblance to television with the extension of video on demand.

As such, the platform offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, live streams, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.