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Google often releases new YouTube experiments for premium members to try, and if successful, these tend to become full-fledged features in the main YouTube app. If you navigate to YouTube’s experiments page right now, you’ll be met with their latest endeavor called “Unmute mobile search results”. This one runs until June 30, 2022, so it will be active for almost a month if you toggle it on.
Once turned on, searching in the YouTube bar will produce a list of videos that match your query. While a preview will play, no sound exists, but with this new feature, tapping the speaker icon at the top right of the thumbnail will start audio playback. You can also tap the “cc” icon to enable or disable captions. Both can be useful in helping you determine whether or not you’d like to click on a video and watch it in full.
Tap to unmute is only available on Android and iOS devices, and not all search results support inline playback. Additionally, you’ll have to go to Settings > General > Playback in feeds to toggle on playback, to begin with. If you don’t, all of your results will be static thumbnails instead. Again, if you’re not seeing this experiment, it’s because you’re not a YouTube Premium subscriber!
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