YouTube announces a wave of new features, including redesigned communities, channel promotion and automatic dubbing

YouTube prepares to receive the largest tool update not since Susan Wojcicki stepped down as CEO, but long before. The Alphabet subsidiary, which had largely limited itself to adding moderation and monetization tools, will roll out new AI features for both creators and media consumers, all while empowering its Communities to prevent erosion by platforms like Discord.

AI-generated content and multi-language dubbing

Starting with the use of artificial intelligence, YouTube has announced that it will integrate DeepMind’s video generation, dubbed Veo, into YouTube Shorts, allowing users to create six-second clips and backgrounds to support live-action content. These videos will receive a SynthID watermark and be marked as AI-generated to avoid confusion for viewers.
YouTube Studio will also offer AI-powered suggestions for creating new videos. Through an assistant, the platform will generate ideas for new videos, descriptions, headlines, and even thumbnails generated by AI, basically automating the creative process. This tool will undoubtedly be the subject of controversy among detractors of what is already beginning to be known as sloplow-quality content generated without the slightest hint of human creativity.

The use of AI will also be coming to video translation. If until now YouTube included a practical subtitle function, we will soon also see voice dubbing in several languages. This feature is apparently being tested in a very limited way, but over the next few months it will reach “hundreds of thousands”, supporting translations “from Spanish and Portuguese to French, Italian and more.”

More interactive communities and promotion of small channels

On the other hand, YouTube wants to address the complaints of content creators by supporting both small channels, often suffocated by much larger ones and sometimes with the support of specialized agencies, and established channels, which do not have an adequate communication platform with their fans.

Simplification of channel discovery will come from HypeThis feature will allow fans to give some sort of points to give more visibility to “rising stars” (it will be interesting to see what the metric is for judging who falls into that category), which will be displayed in a sort of list. Hype is already in testing in Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan, but will be coming to more countries soon.

Finally, YouTube will give a complete redesign to its stagnant CommunitiesThe new ones will function as a kind of forum where conversations can be started by fans themselves and which will allow followers to upload photos as well as comments, creating an environment far superior to the current blog format, which is very basic and has excessively limited interactivity.

The new communities are currently being tested by a small number of channels, but will be expanded throughout 2025 along with many other minor changes.