YouTube is testing artificial intelligence features with YouTube viewing Premium customers and the long-form video experience. Paid subscribers on mobile platforms who opt-in can participate in the two experimental tests for AI-assisted functions that include help with the comments section and a chatbot tool that lets viewers get answers to questions about videos and recommendations for related content. To help viewers “dive deeper into content” without interrupting playback, a conversational “Ask” icon will appear beneath videos in progress, inviting questions or letting viewers select suggested prompts. Responses include answers and related content recommendations.

“For certain academic videos, the tool can aid learning journeys by providing quizzes and responses that encourage deeper understanding,” YouTube explains on a support thread post.

For comment conversations, AI will now organize “large comment sections of long-form videos into easily digestible themes,” YouTube notes. “If you’re part of this experiment, when you open the comment section on mobile, you’ll see a new option to sort by ‘Topics’ on some videos.”

Creators are urged to use the comment summaries “to more quickly jump into comment discussions on their videos, or to draw inspiration for new content based on what their audiences are discussing.”

Creators can also “remove any comment topics” or “delete individual comments that show up under the specific topic.” Topics will propagate “from published comments only and cannot be created from comments that are held for review, contain blocked words or are from blocked users.” The feature could help with “YouTube’s summaries spiraling out of control the way the platform’s comment sections often do,” Engadget opines.

The conversations experiment is running on a small number of videos in English that have large comment sections. Even opt-in participants won’t see “Topics” listed for all videos.

“Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll learn more about how viewers are using these new features and continue to introduce more updates that make YouTube even more relevant and useful,” a YouTube rep told Variety, which notes that the platform introduced several other AI features at its YouTube Create event, including “a new app with features for automating editing, effects, filters and transitions; Dream Screen, which can create AI-generated video and image backgrounds to set new dynamic scenes for YouTube Shorts; and Aloud, an AI-powered dubbing tool.”

YouTube announced in July an experiment with AI auto-generating video summaries, “but the new tool appears to be broader in scope” in that it also answers question with a chatbot, The Verge observes.