What you need to know
- YouTube is testing a feature that lets users customize Home feed suggestions using an AI-style text prompt.
- The new Your Custom Feed option will appear next to Home for users included in the experimental rollout.
- Users will be able to enter prompts to request more specific content, and YouTube will adjust recommendations accordingly.
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YouTube seems to be testing a new feature that would let users tweak the kind of suggested content they see on the Home tab by allowing them to input the feed they want through what appears to be an AI prompt.
Currently, when you open YouTube on the web or your phone, you're taken to the main Home tab that shows a feed of suggested videos based on your watch history, likes, subscribed channels, and sometimes a video you left unfinished.
This feed is generated in real-time by an algorithm that depends on many factors. Currently, there's no straightforward way to tell YouTube what content you prefer, apart from liking videos or watching similar ones.
It appears that to understand users better and offer more accurate suggestions, YouTube will soon let people specify what kind of videos they'd like to see on the homepage.
YouTube might soon let you tune your video suggestions using AI
As first spotted by 9to5Google, YouTube will debut an experimental feature called "Your custom feed". According to YouTube, this will let you tweak your Home recommendations "by entering a single prompt."
We don't yet know how the feature looks, but based on YouTube's forum post, if you're part of the experiment, you'll see a new Your Custom Feed button next to Home.
When you enter that section, you'll be able to adjust your recommendations by entering a prompt. YouTube will, presumably, use AI and its existing algorithm to recommend more videos based on what you ask.
So, for example, I'd be able to tell YouTube to show me more Chelsea or soccer-related content, and it should recommend more of those videos. At least in theory, that's how it's expected to work, but we haven't seen any reports of how the feature looks or functions yet.
We'll keep an eye out for when the new YouTube experiment starts rolling out, but for now, it seems extremely limited. Until then, you can try the new DM feature that YouTube has started testing in a few regions.
