YouTube Music gets more conversational with new AI features

YouTube is adding new AI-powered features to YouTube Music that aim to make it easier for listeners to discover music, explore artists, and find podcasts they may otherwise miss.

Announced at this year’s Made On YouTube event, the updates include “Ask Music,” a conversational tool for music and podcasts, and “Your Podcast Lineup,” a personalized audio guide designed to help listeners discover new shows.

Built directly into the YouTube Music app, Ask Music lets users describe what they want to hear in everyday language rather than searching for individual songs or artists. The feature works across YouTube Music’s catalog of more than 300 million songs, including official recordings, remixes, live performances, covers, and DJ sets. Users can use it to build custom listening queues, explore an artist’s motivations, or dig deeper into music history.

YouTube explains that, instead of manually searching, the user simply types the request as if they were asking a friend. For instance, someone could ask Ask Music to create a mix based on the tracks that inspired a particular song. Users can also ask other questions, such as who played bass on a particular song or other details about its creation.

YouTube Music is also introducing Your Podcast Lineup, a personalized AI-generated audio guide for podcast discovery.

The feature is designed for a familiar problem: There are more podcasts than most people have time to listen to. Even listeners who already have a list of favorite shows can struggle to keep up with new episodes, let alone find new ones.

Your Podcast Lineup will appear on the podcast page in the YouTube Music app. Each week, it will provide a short spoken preview of recommended shows and explain why they might appeal to the listener. It can then move directly into suggested episodes.

Spotify recently introduced an AI-powered feature that follows a similar direction. Its personal podcasts feature uses AI to generate podcast episodes based on their interests and prompts.

The new features are part of YouTube’s broader push to use AI throughout its services. Last year, YouTube Music experimented with AI-powered music hosts that provide stories, fan trivia, and commentary related to what users are listening to.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Lauren by emailing laurenf.techcrunch@gmail.com or via encrypted message at laurenforris22.25 on Signal.

Your next big connection is at Disrupt. Connect with 10,000+ founders, VCs, operators, and tech leaders. Explore tomorrow’s breakthroughs, hear what’s shaping tech today, and save up to $200 by Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance

Meta’s Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch

Tilly Norwood’s press tour is going about as well as you’d expect for an AI

Anthropic is operating a lab that conducts biology experiments

A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers

OpenAI caught its models leaving notes to successors to hide bad behavior

Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal