- Google has announced a new feature called ‘Ask YouTube’
- This lets you ask long and 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 now underway, and among the many announcements emerging from the Californian showcase, Google has unveiled ‘Ask YouTube’ – a feature that adds conversational AI to the popular video streaming platform.
With Ask YouTube, instead of searching for a specific video the old-fashioned way, you can ask complex and lengthy questions, and Gemini will serve up specific videos that it believes best answer your query. Helpfully, you will also be sent directly to the relevant section of the videos in question instead of having to skim through them.
An example query provided by Google was: “How do I teach my 3-year-old to ride a pedal bike, they already know how to ride a balance bike?” As you can see in the video below, the results provided written responses like a typical AI chatbot, but these were accompanied by relevant YouTube videos so you can both read and watch to get the answers you’re looking for.
The idea behind Ask YouTube is to make the information more digestible, and to make it easier to actually 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 recently rolled out to Google Maps. Although Ask Maps is currently only available in the US and India, and at launch, Ask YouTube will only be available 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 be able to access Ask YouTube sometime “this summer” — probably sometime between June and September.
And if you’re happy doing things the way they are now, you can always just ignore the new Ask YouTube button that’s coming soon.
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