Google held its third annual behind-closed-doors ‘Made on YouTube’ event on September 18th, offering media and creators an extensive look at a variety of new features that are coming to the video-sharing platform.
Lots of AI
First, YouTube outlined how it’s leveraging Google’s extensive AI framework to provide creators with new options. Part of this involves expanding Dream Screen, a feature first introduced last year that offers AI-generated image or video backgrounds for YouTube Shorts.
Later this year, YouTube will integrate Google DeepMind’s Veo, the tech giant’s most capable generative video model, into Shorts. One example YouTube gives is a ‘BookTuber’ stepping into the pages of a novel like The Secret Garden. Veo will also allow you to create six-second standalone video clips that can then be added to Shorts. YouTube says all of these Veo-powered creations will feature a label to communicate to viewers that they were generated with AI.
Additionally, generative AI will overhaul the Inspiration Tab, which gives greater insight into what YouTube users are watching on the platform. In 2025, YouTube will add a new shortcut that takes you right to the Inspiration Tab from top comments, other videos and other areas to streamline the ideation process.
AI is also being used for some quality-of-life features. For one, YouTube says it plans to expand its AI-powered automatic dubbing feature to “hundreds of thousands more” users while adding support for new languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian. YouTube adds that it’s working with a handful of creators to deepen this dubbing by taking intonation and tone into account in the translation.
Finally, new AI-enhanced reply suggestions will be provided to creators to give them a starting point for responses to viewer comments. This will be found in the YouTube Studio app’s new ‘Community’ tab, which replaces the old ‘Comments’ tab.
Everything else
Outside of AI, YouTube says it plans to expand Communities, which are currently only available on a “handful” of channels, to more channels in early 2025. For the uninitiated, Communities are central hubs for a specific channel in which users can connect with others in the audience by discussing videos, sharing fan art and more.
And on the subject of discussion, YouTube plans to broaden availability of ‘Hype,’ a feature in which users can ‘Hype’ a video to give it points that will feature it on a special leaderboard for greater opportunity for discovery. This feature is currently being tested in Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan and will be expanded to more users “in the coming months.”
Other Made on YouTube announcements include an expansion of the YouTube Shopping affiliate program to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam (no Canada yet), Jewels and gifts that fans can provide to creators during livestreams (currently only slated to launch “first” in the U.S.), and more display organization options for creators who sell through YouTube TV.
Stay tuned to MobileSyrup for more coverage from Made on YouTube 2024, including hands-on impressions of some of these features.
Image credit: YouTube
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
