YouTube is rolling out three new quality of life features aimed directly at the more than 1 billion active podcast listeners who use YouTube and YouTube Music each month. Features include improved playback controls, which should make listening to podcasts much easier on the go, as well as an AI feature built right into the YouTube Music app that will help make finding new podcasts much simpler and interactive.
The biggest downside, of course, is that all of these new features are exclusive to YouTube Premium subscribers. We recently saw a YouTube Premium price hike earlier this year, increasing the subscription fee for the standard plan from $13.99 to $15.99. The Google-owned brand has been locking new features behind the subscription for years now. YouTube even paid for the lyrics feature earlier this year, so it’s no surprise to see YouTube limiting the new Listening Control feature exclusively to Premium users.
Here are the new features
YouTube announced the new features this week, highlighting how YouTube Premium subscribers watched more than 800 million hours of podcasts in April 2026 alone and how these additional features are intended to make watching podcasts even easier. The first big feature, called On-the-go mode, is a friendlier set of controls that will place larger buttons on the screen for pausing, playing, and skipping tracks. On-the-go mode is already rolling out to Android devices and is expected to come to iOS devices in the coming months.
YouTube is also introducing Auto Speed, a feature that dynamically changes playback speed based on how fast someone is speaking in the video. YouTube says the feature is intended to speed up dense sections of podcasts so users can absorb as much content as possible without manually adjusting the playback speed. This seems like a nice feature for long podcasts.
Finally, the latest new feature is Ask Music for podcasts. Google previously introduced this AI-powered feature to help users expand their playlists and libraries. However, it will now also make podcast discovery easier, allowing users to get help from AI to find podcasts based on their mood, genre, and more. As of this writing, the feature is available in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Latin American countries (excluding Brazil), Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
