YouTube Music adds AI-powered 'Ask Music' search tool

YouTube is adding new AI-powered features to YouTube Music aimed at making it easier for listeners to discover music, explore artists, and find podcasts they might otherwise miss.

Announced at this year’s Made On YouTube event, the updates include “Ask Music,” a conversational tool for music and podcasts, and “Your Podcast Lineup,” a personalized audio guide designed to help listeners discover new shows.

Built directly into the YouTube Music app, Ask Music lets users describe what they want to hear in everyday language rather than searching for individual songs or artists. The feature works across YouTube Music’s catalog of more than 300 million songs, including official recordings, remixes, live performances, covers, and DJ sets. Users can use it to build custom listening queues, explore an artist’s motivations, or dig deeper into music history. For instance, someone could ask Ask Music to create a mix based on the tracks that inspired a particular song, or ask who played bass on a particular song or other details about its creation.

YouTube Music is also introducing Your Podcast Lineup, a personalized AI-generated audio guide for podcast discovery. The feature is designed for a familiar problem: there are more podcasts than most people have time to listen to, and even listeners who already have a list of favorite shows can struggle to keep up with new episodes, let alone find new ones. Your Podcast Lineup will appear on the podcast page in the YouTube Music app; each week, it will provide a short spoken preview of recommended shows and explain why they might appeal to the listener, then move directly into suggested episodes.

Spotify recently introduced an AI-powered feature that follows a similar direction: its personal podcasts feature uses AI to generate podcast episodes based on a listener’s interests and prompts. The new YouTube Music features are part of the platform’s broader push to use AI throughout its services — last year, YouTube Music experimented with AI-powered music hosts that provide stories, fan trivia, and commentary related to what users are listening to. Both updates are coming soon to YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers worldwide.

Why it matters

Embedding conversational search and personalized audio guidance directly into a music app signals that natural-language interfaces are becoming the default way platforms expect people to navigate large content catalogs, not just an add-on feature.