It had to happen: YouTube is going big on AI. The video platform has announced a slew of tools that are driven by AI and the company hopes that more people will post videos on YouTube because a deep understanding of AI won’t be necessary. Among the features coming later this year or next are AI-generated photo and video backgrounds, AI video topic suggestions and music search. Plus, there is a new app called YouTube Create.

All these tools are coming in fast and thick because YouTube’s parent company, Google, has been investing on generative AI systems for a long time. Take the example of Google Search: The company is testing placing AI search results at the top in the form of Search Generative Experience.

YouTube Create

One of the problems new creators face is learning how to edit videos and the use of complicated tools. Most content creators want to keep it simple. And that’s where YouTube Create will help. The free-of-charge app will help anyone to create and share videos right to YouTube and it involves production tools to edit Shorts, longer videos, or both. The company said it consulted with 3,000 creators on the development of the new app.

To use the tool, creators need to line up their clips and then choose from a range of editing tools to begin creating their videos. You can do things like preview splits and trim clips. There are plenty of stickers, GIFs, and a set of effects available within the app.

Editing tools include precision editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters, effects, transitions and royalty-free music with beat-matching technology. The beats technology is something popularised by TikTok. Overall, it feels a bit like iMovie on the iPhone.

Other features include the ability to do audio clean-up or remove unwanted background sounds. You can export the final product to the creator’s YouTube channel.

Most apps have some built-in effects but it’s never enough. TikTok users, for example, fall back on ByteDance’s creative app CapCut to prepare videos.

YouTube Create is currently in beta on Android in select markets, including India, the US, Germany, France, the UK, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore.

Let’s go, AI!

The biggest feature that YouTube has announced is a feature called Dream Screen, which will create AI-generated videos and photos that creators can place in the background of their YouTube Shorts. Coming later this year, the new experimental feature allows creators to generate fantastic settings for their Shorts by typing the idea into a text prompt.

Since launching Shorts in 2020, Shorts has now climbed to over 70 billion daily views from over 2 billion logged-in users every month. The new tool will only help to take the figure even further.

Further, a new AI feature in YouTube Studio will generate topic ideas and outlines for potential videos. And suggestions will be personalised to individual creators. Also, an AI-powered music recommendation system will take a written description of a creator’s video and suggest audio to use, reports The Verge.

AI-powered dubbing tool

The other tool YouTube is bringing is Aloud, an AI-powered dubbing tool that will help creators easily reach audiences beyond their primary language. Available to select creators, the feature is currently being tested in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.