YouTube Music is testing a new feature that sounds a lot like Spotify's AI DJ

• YouTube Music has a new AI music hosts feature
• It sounds similar to the AI DJ in Spotify
• The new feature is part of a YouTube Labs portal

If you're a YouTube Music user in the US, then you may have an experimental new feature to test out in your account: It's being introduced as part of what YouTube is calling YouTube Labs, so it looks as though more experiments will be on the way in the future.

YouTube Labs is apparently "dedicated to exploring the potential of AI on YouTube", and the first test to be pushed out is something called AI music hosts. These hosts are going to "deepen your listening experience" by sharing relevant stories, fan trivia, and "fun" commentary in between tracks in the YouTube Music app.

As per the official announcement, it's open to a "limited number" of users in the US – we're not yet part of the group, so we can't tell you exactly how the feature works. However, it does sound similar to the AI DJ that's available as part of Spotify Premium.

The folks over at 9to5Google have got the AI music hosts feature working, and it adds a new button to the now playing screen, just to the right of the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. You can tap on this to enable AI-powered interjections.

What's new is new again

This seems to be a bit of a rebranding exercise rather than a completely new initiative. For some time now, YouTube Premium users have been able to head to www.youtube.com/new to test out a variety of experimental features.

Now the same URL is being used for YouTube Labs, so it would seem it just has a new name and a new AI focus (surprise surprise). In fact, it didn't really have an old name – it was just referred to as an experimental features page. Past experiments have included more audio quality and playback speed options.

While the YouTube blog post announcement doesn't specify that the features are exclusive to YouTube Premium, there is a YouTube Premium tag attached to the post, so presumably you need to be subscribing to take advantage of this first test.

Past experiments have often been limited to specific regions and devices, but sometimes get rolled out to everyone, eventually. We'll have to wait and see exactly how this AI music hosts feature works, and what else is in the pipeline.

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