Google Assistant is being injected into Youtube via its latest experiment

The ability to download Youtube videos directly from the web on desktop – much like its Android and iOS app counterpart – was tested out just last week, and while that experiment may be coming to a close, another one is taking its place. Google is finding ways to inject Assistant and all of its intelligence into Youtube until October 27, 2021, after which date it will no longer work.

For those familiar, Youtube’s experiments are short-lived chances to try out new and exciting features on the platform so that Google can gather feedback and move towards mass adoption and roll out. Now, toggling on the ‘Do more with Assistant’ experiment will let you see suggestions for topics related to videos you’re watching on Android mobile phones in English.

Opening the description section of specific videos will reveal a helpful, new card related to said video, and tapping it will take you directly to a Google Search result. It can be argued that launching the Assistant voice search on your phone or typing the topic directly into a search box could be faster, but having suggestions intelligently injected into your workflow is a much more organic way to find relevant information in my opinion.

I’ll be honest here though – after enabling this for myself, I discovered that practically zero videos that I clicked on showed me the Assistant card, so for now, it was useless in my case. You may have more luck – 9to5Google found that the official Netflix trailer for ‘The Harder They Fall’ did pull up the card, so your mileage may vary.

If you’d like to try this for yourself, you’ll need to be a Youtube Premium subscriber. Additionally, you’ll need to visit the experiments page and select which ones you’d like to take part in. As always, providing the aforementioned feedback is truly the purpose of these tests, but you can simply enjoy them while they last if you’d like.

What I’d love to see Youtube add is the on-screen Assistant cards for paused videos that Google Play Movies and TV always had. Anyone or anything that’s on-screen would be circled, and tapping it would perform a Google search on that actor or actress, showing other movies they’ve starred in, and so on. It even called up songs that were playing in the background when you paused the video.