YouTube Music is introducing two new ways to boost song discovery on the platform. YouTube on Monday announced it's experimenting with an AI-generated conversational radio feature and rolling out a new Shazam-like tool that lets users discover songs by singing, humming or playing snippets of a song.
YouTube Music's new AI-generated conversational radio feature is rolling out to some premium users in the U.S. Those with access to the feature can create custom radio stations by describing the songs they want to hear, such as requesting “catchy pop choruses” or “upbeat pop anthems.”
The launch of the experimental feature comes as no surprise, as 9to5Google reported last week that YouTube Music had begun testing the feature.
YouTube Music's new feature is somewhat similar to the AI playlist generation tools currently being tested by Spotify, Amazon Music and, as of Monday, Deezer, with all four music streaming services introducing ways to let users input written prompts to generate a personalized listening experience.
Users with access to this new feature will see a new “Request Music Any Way” card in the app's home feed. When they click on the card, the app will open a conversational UI where they can enter a custom prompt or select a suggested prompt.
The feature is currently only available to some users, but YouTube says it plans to roll it out to more users in the future.
As for the new song recognition feature, YouTube Music users can now search the app's song catalog by sound. When you tap “Search” in the app, you'll see a waveform icon informing you that you can find the name of a song by singing, humming, or playing it.
Shazam is probably the best-known song recognition tool, but YouTube Music's new feature goes a step further by letting you search for song titles by humming or singing them, whereas Shazam only works if you play the actual song.
YouTube Music's song discovery tool was first made available to some Android YouTube Music users earlier this year, and has now officially rolled out to all iOS and Android users.