YouTube is currently trialing a new feature that will generate AI “hosts” that can comment on the music you’re listening to.
As PCMag reports, the new feature is dubbed, “Beyond the Beat,” these AI music hosts are designed to deepen your listening experience by sharing relevant stories and fan trivia about what you’re listening to on the YouTube Music app. For example, the story behind the events that inspired the lyrics, or when or how the band broke up—like a good radio DJ. The tool comes as part of Google’s YouTube Labs initiative, which is intended as a way to allow people to test-drive new experimental AI features.
If you’d like to give the new feature a whirl, a prototype is already available, although you’ll need to be a Premium subscriber based in the US for it to work. You’ll need to head to the YouTube Labs website to sign up; once you do, a sparkling Google Gemini logo will appear as a button on the Now Playing screen, which you can use to toggle the feature off and on. Once you’ve opted into the experiment, you can’t permanently turn the feature off, but you can choose to pause it for one hour or for one day.
If you do want to try the feature out, you might not have long. Google made it clear that it may remove the experimental feature at any time. It is also only available to a limited number of users, so even if you meet all the criteria, you still may not be able to get it to work.
Google isn’t the first firm to try applying AI commentary to the world of music streaming. Spotify rolled out its AI DJ feature over two years ago, which not only generates commentary on what you’re listening to, but can put together personalized playlists based on your tastes and listening history.
Seeing this type of feature eventually coming to YouTube isn’t too surprising; Google’s got plenty of experience at this point using its generative AI for voice summaries. Since September 2024, NotebookLM introduced an Audio Overview feature that can summarize the material you input to generate conversations between two AI hosts. Meanwhile, since July, Google has been testing a new way to transform its AI-generated search results into “quick, conversational audio overviews for certain search queries.”
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