Uses AI to take you to the most exciting part.
YouTube is testing a new feature in videos that lets you skip sections many users usually skip. In this way, you should be able to quickly get to the parts of the video that are most interesting, writes 9to5Google.
The feature, called “Jump ahead”, will be powered by artificial intelligence and uses viewer data to identify the “next best point” in the video. Already today, you can see a kind of graph of the playback track that shows where the most users follow, and it is probably this data that is used as the basis for the new function.
This is how Jump Ahead works
To use the new feature, double-click on the side of the screen, which usually sends you forward 10 seconds in the video. Here, however, a “Jump ahead” button will now appear for a few seconds in the lower right corner, before it disappears if you only wanted to go forward by 10 seconds.
If you press the button, you will be told that you are skipping the parts of the video that are mostly skipped by other users. You should be able to do this several times in the video, in case there are several “highlights”.
How to access Jump Ahead?
First of all, the new feature is only for paying users of YouTube Premium. Second, it seems like it’s all locked to the US and for Android users. It also seems that the function assumes that the video has received enough views to have viewer data to be able to say something about where the highlights actually are.
To activate the feature, you have to go to youtube.com/new, or go to your profile page in the YouTube app and go to the experiment page there. On our side, it is currently completely empty, as we are outside the USA.
Right now it says that the Jump Ahead feature is an experiment that will only last until June 1st, but Google has had a habit of extending those times several times, or rolling out the feature to all users if they see that it’s popular and useful enough.
Would you consider using a “jump ahead” function?
