At its Made On YouTube event in New York on 23 September, YouTube announced Custom Feeds: a prompt box on the homepage where a viewer describes the kind of video they want recommended, and the platform builds a feed from that description. The company’s examples are phrased as ordinary requests — witty podcasts for a 30-minute commute, evening wind-down with long documentaries, help discovering new DIY creators.
Viewers can save more than one feed to the home screen, and YouTube says each keeps refreshing with new recommendations rather than freezing as a static list. Support for building multiple feeds reaches web and mobile next month, according to TechCrunch.
Why a prompt box is a bigger change than it looks
YouTube’s recommendation system has always inferred what you want from what you watched. A prompt box does something different: it accepts a stated preference, in words, and treats it as an instruction. Those two signals can disagree, and the interesting engineering question is which one wins when they do — whether a feed you asked for survives contact with what you actually click.
It also gives the viewer something to point at. A recommendation nobody asked for is hard to complain about; a feed built from a sentence you wrote is a thing with a stated purpose, and a visible gap between the request and the result.
The rest of the slate is aimed at creators
YouTube announced a conversational editing assistant that works through suggested or typed prompts in Shorts and the YouTube Create app, producing a first draft and handling jobs such as trimming pauses and reordering clips. YouTube Studio gains guidance on early drafts, thumbnail generation matched to a channel’s existing style, and A/B testing for videos.
Two further items are about identity and moderation. Likeness detection, which scans for unauthorised synthetic use of a creator’s face, is coming to mobile, and YouTube says it plans to combine speaking-voice detection with facial detection to improve match accuracy. Live streams get real-time automatic dubbing, and community management gets AI-assisted comment moderation.
What YouTube did not say
The announcement post does not name the model behind Custom Feeds; reporting on the event attributes the feature to Gemini. It also gives no firm dates beyond “coming soon” and by the end of 2026 for most of the creator tools, and says nothing about whether a custom feed will carry the same ad load as the default home feed — which is the question that decides whether this ships widely or stays a settings-menu curiosity.
What to watch
Whether the feeds are editable after creation, whether YouTube exposes why a video landed in one, and whether the voice half of likeness detection ships with a date attached rather than as a stated plan.
