Podcasts On YouTube Just Got A Big Update (But There's A Catch)

YouTube is rolling out three new quality-of-life features aimed directly at more than one billion active podcast listeners who use YouTube and YouTube Music every month. The features include improved playback controls, which should make listening to podcasts much easier when you're on the move, as well as an AI function built directly into the YouTube Music app that will help make finding new podcasts much simpler and more 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, raising 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 paywalled the lyrics feature earlier this year, so it isn't that surprising to see YouTube limiting the new listening controls feature exclusively to Premium users.

YouTube announced the arrival of the new features this week, highlighting how YouTube Premium subscribers watched over 800 million hours of podcasts in April 2026 alone and how these additional functions are meant to make enjoying podcasts even easier. The first big feature, called On-the-go mode, is a set of more listener-friendly 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 hit iOS devices in the coming months.

YouTube is also introducing the Auto Speed option, a feature that dynamically changes playback speed depending on how fast or slow someone is speaking in the video. YouTube says the functionality is meant to help speed up dense sections of podcasts so that users can soak up as much of the content without adjusting the playback speed manually. This seems like a great feature for long podcasts.

Finally, the last new function 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 help with podcast discovery, allowing users to get the AI's assistance in finding podcasts based on 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.