YouTube Adds Speed Controls and High-Quality Audio for Premium Users

YouTube announced on Wednesday it's introducing a new round of experimental features to Premium users, enhanced audio quality, an optional faster playback speed for mobile and a "jump ahead" option on the web that skips straight to the interesting part.

The company regularly tests new features that users can try out on youtube.com/new. They've announced that an experimental feature is now available, allowing users to listen to music videos with a higher audio bitrate of up to 256kbps. Just as a reminder, YouTube Music already provides this audio quality when you adjust the playback settings to High.

On mobile, picture-in-picture mode can be useful for quickly replying to a text or email, or checking something else while a video is playing. One of the new tests now lets users play YouTube Shorts in picture-in-picture mode on iOS.

In addition, YouTube is introducing the option to enable smart downloads for Shorts on iOS. With smart downloads activated, YouTube will automatically download videos you might like when you're connected to a strong network. This allows you to watch them offline later. These features have already been available to Android users.

If you like watching videos at a higher playback speed, YouTube now allows you to watch them at up to 4x speed on mobile. Until now, the users could set 2x as the highest playback speed.

Last year, YouTube launched a “Jump Ahead” feature on mobile, enabling users to skip to the most engaging parts of a video. The algorithm identifies these key moments based on machine learning and user feedback. Now, YouTube is expanding this feature to the web, available to Premium users.

Google is also expanding two AI-driven features for YouTube. For YouTube Music, the "Ask Music" feature is now available in the U.K. and Ireland. Users can request things like "upbeat workout tracks" or "relaxing jazz," and the app will generate a personalized radio station based on their request. Competing services like Spotify and Amazon Music have been experimenting with similar features as well.

In 2023, YouTube started an experiment called a conversational AI feature that gives users the ability to ask questions about a video or get recommendations. The company has now announced that this feature is available to iOS users, as well.