You might soon see this AI feature in YouTube Shorts on mobile

YouTube is testing its AI-powered comment topic summarization feature for Shorts. The experimental feature will only appear in the video streaming giant’s iOS and Android apps for now, and will be available on a select number of Shorts that feature large comment sections from select creators. The feature sorts the comment section into trending topics based on user-generated comments. AI topics were first announced last year and later rolled out globally for long-form videos. Notably, YouTube is also testing an AI-powered custom green screen image generation tool called Dream Screen for Shorts.

YouTube tests AI topics for Shorts

In his dedicated support page for testing features and experiments, YouTube shared details of the feature. The platform said it is testing the feature for summarizing comment topics for Shorts. The minute-long vertical videos with infinite scrolling have become a popular addition to the streaming platform.

YouTube is now adding the comment topic feature to increase user participation in conversations. The AI-powered topic summary feature works in a simple way. It pulls all published comments to find similar keywords. It then categorizes the most discussed keywords into different sections and generates a title for each topic.

In long videos, these topics are visible on the mobile app once the user opens the comments section. A new “Topics” tab appears at the top of the section, which shows various labeled topics when clicked. Each topic shows all relevant comments to help users easily find and contribute to interesting conversations.

YouTube said that during the test, the AI ​​topics will be visible on Shorts by select creators who are part of the experiment groups. The company will choose Shorts with large comment sections and feature topics. Front-end visibility will also be available to a small number of users who watch the videos on the mobile app.

If creators want to remove a topic, they must delete individual comments that appear under a specific topic. YouTube further explained that the AI ​​only uses published comments to align them thematically, and comments that are held for review, comments that contain blocked words, or are from blocked users are not considered.