YouTube adds custom feeds and a Gemini editing partner

YouTube used its annual Made On YouTube event to lay out a platform that picks what you watch and helps make what you post. The announcements on 23 September split into viewer features that reshape the homepage and creator tools that lean on Google's Gemini models.

Custom feeds put you in charge of the homepage

Viewers will be able to build and save several home feeds tuned to different moods and interests, from long documentaries to wind down with to new DIY creators, and switch between them instead of accepting one algorithmic front page. YouTube says custom feeds will reach users in the United States on web, mobile and televisions soon.

Search is changing shape at the same time. Ask YouTube now takes follow-up questions in a conversational thread, and on a TV it accepts voice commands. Ask about reviews of a particular product and the answer can arrive as an organised comparison table of attributes and categories, with videos to continue into.

A Gemini editing assistant for Shorts

Creators get a conversational editing partner inside Shorts and the YouTube Create app. It starts from suggested prompts or your own brief, then takes instructions to reorder frames, trim clips and sync music to the beat while you move between the chat and a manual timeline. YouTube says hundreds of thousands of channels used Gemini Omni features daily in August 2026 alone, and points to its first GenAI trends report, which found 72% of US video posters aged 14 to 44 had used AI to create or edit in the past year.

Studio gets feedback, thumbnails test themselves

YouTube Studio adds Insights and Research destinations for reading past performance and finding outlier videos worth copying, a feedback feature that comments on pacing, structure and storytelling in a draft, and channel-matched thumbnails. Dynamic thumbnails go further and let YouTube show the strongest of three options to different parts of an audience.

Faces and now voices

Likeness detection, YouTube's automated deepfake matching, is open to billions of channels, and the company says speaking-voice detection will be folded into facial detection later this year as groundwork for wider voice protection. Creators will also be able to set up and review likeness detection from the mobile app rather than a desktop.

Live, music and podcasts

On the live side YouTube is adding Showdowns for friendly competition between streamers, co-hosting, fan funding and real-time auto-dubbing that crosses language barriers. Music listeners get Ask Music for finding a track conversationally, and podcast listeners get Podcast Lineup, a weekly set of summaries of the shows they follow.

Our opinion

Read the two halves of this announcement together and the strategy is plain. YouTube is giving viewers tools to steer their own feed at the exact moment every other platform is being accused of feeding people whatever holds attention longest. Custom feeds are a concession that one algorithmic homepage does not fit everyone, and they are cheaper than fixing the ranking.

The creator side is the more consequential half. A Gemini assistant that trims, syncs and reorders takes work off small channels that cannot afford editors, and voice detection is a genuine answer to a threat that has already cost creators money. Both also deepen the platform's grip: the editing happens in YouTube, the likeness profile lives in YouTube, and leaving means giving all of it up. Useful tools and lock-in are the same announcement here, which is worth remembering the next time the company describes a feature as a gift to creators.