YouTube has added artificial intelligence features to YouTube Music aimed at making music and podcast discovery easier. The updates, announced on September 23, 2026, were introduced at the Made On YouTube event.
- “Ask Music” allows users to write in everyday language what they want to listen to, rather than searching for a song or artist name. Working across YouTube Music’s catalog of more than 300 million songs, the feature can create custom listening queues and explain artists’ motivations and music history. Users can also ask details such as who played bass guitar on a particular song or how the piece was prepared.
- “Your Podcast Lineup” offers a personalized, artificial intelligence-generated audio guide for podcast discovery. The feature, which will appear on YouTube Music’s podcast page, will introduce recommended shows each week with a brief audio preview, explain why they may be of interest, and then move on to the recommended episodes. The feature aims to address the difficulty of keeping track of the large number of podcasts and new episodes.
Spotify had also recently introduced a personal podcast feature that uses artificial intelligence to create podcast episodes based on users’ interests and prompts. The new tools are part of YouTube’s plan to expand the use of artificial intelligence across its services. Last year, the company tested artificial intelligence-powered music hosts that provide stories, fan information and commentary related to the content being listened to.
Why it matters
These steps are moving discovery in music and podcast catalogs away from relying solely on title or artist searches and toward a model in which users can express their intent and interests more directly. This shift is particularly relevant to podcast listeners who struggle to choose among a large number of shows and new episodes; providing the rationale behind recommendations and short audio previews makes the discovery process more guided. For YouTube, the development shows that artificial intelligence is spreading from individual experiments to different stages of its music and podcast services. Spotify’s move in a similar direction toward personalization reveals that competition between platforms is extending beyond the number of available content items to the experience of accessing and choosing content. The extent to which these features will change user habits remains unclear.
Background
YouTube is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 12 news articles mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the most recent is dated September 25, 2026.