- Google has announced a new feature called ‘Ask YouTube’
- This allows you to ask long, detailed questions when searching for a video.
- It uses Gemini and makes the service a little more like a chatbot.
Google I/O 2026 is underway, and among the many announcements coming out of the California-set showcase, Google has revealed ‘Ask YouTube’, a feature that adds conversational artificial intelligence to the popular video streaming platform.
With Ask YouTube, instead of searching for a specific video the old-fashioned way, you can ask long, complex questions, and Gemini will show you the specific videos that it thinks best answer your query. What’s useful is that you will also be sent directly to the relevant part of the videos in question, rather than having to skim through them.
An example query provided by Google was: “How to teach my 3-year-old to ride a pedal bike if he already knows how to ride a balance bike?” As you can see in the video below, the results returned answers written like a typical AI chatbot, but they were accompanied by relevant YouTube videos, so you can read and watch to get the answers you’re looking for.
The idea of Ask YouTube is to make information more digestible and make it easier to find useful videos and the relevant parts of them.
Coming this summer, but only to the US.
Ask YouTube is a similar idea to ‘Ask Maps’, a feature that was recently implemented in Google Maps. Although currently, Ask Maps is only available in the US and India, and at launch, Ask YouTube will only be accessible in the US.
So, much of the world will be stuck waiting for this exciting new feature, but if you’re in the US, you should get access to Ask YouTube sometime “this summer,” meaning presumably between June and September.
And if you’re happy with doing things the current way, you can always ignore the new Ask YouTube button that’s coming soon.
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