YouTube Adds Voice Commands Support to Search Videos
Google’s popular video streaming platform, YouTube, has integrated a new functionality to its app that lets people operate the site through voice commands.
Users will now find a microphone icon right next to the search bar. When you click on it for the first time, a notification will pop up asking you to grant permission to the website or application to use your microphone. Once you click on “allow,” again, a popup box will appear on your screen saying “listening,” as you speak, the platform will try to identify what you are asking for to present you with relevant results. However, before jumping to the search results page, the platform will first display a written text of your query. In case it doesn’t match what you actually wanted to search, you can tap on the microphone again to repeat your voice command.
This newly-added support for voice commands is not just restricted to searching for relevant videos. Users can also navigate through the platform by using this feature as it also functions on voice commands such as show me my watch history, what’s new from my subscriptions, show me my library, and much more.
As per the reports, YouTube is broadly rolling out the new support for voice commands on the web for logged in as well as signed-out users.
Earlier this week, the platform also introduced a new page format for videos that incorporates hashtags. Before this, when users searched for or clicked on a hashtag, the platform displayed a mix of videos using that specific hashtag and other relevant content.
On the other hand, if now a user searches for or clicks on a particular hashtag, whether on a mobile device or desktop, they will see a dedicated page containing only those videos that are using the specific hashtag, which the video-streaming platform claims are organized to display the best videos at the top of the page.
Users can also access these curated pages by tapping on any automatically linked hashtag they come across on the platform. While hashtags seemed pretty useless on this video-streaming platform earlier, this new update actually makes a lot of sense. With this update, people will now be able to discover video content with the help of hashtags, just the way it works on other social media platforms, especially Twitter and Instagram.
Further adding to this, the company has also announced that they are planning to introduce some more significant changes to hashtags in the near future.
Wrapping It Up
The last significant change YouTube introduced on the web was the autoplay controls within the video player. And now it is back with some more exciting updates.
Voice-based search is a rising trend in the search industry, and more and more platforms are focusing on adding support for this. Following the trend, the video streaming site has added support for voice commands now to facilitate a faster and smoother search experience. And not just for search, users can utilize this tool for hands-free navigation on the platform too.
This feature is similar to the voice search users get with Google.com. As of now, YouTube has begun rolling out this update to a broader audience. According to the company, we can expect more updates on the platform soon. So go ahead and try this feature out now!