Google has started rolling out the YouTube Music extension for its Gemini chatbot. The extension allows users to command the chatbot to play songs from YouTube Music. For instance, you can ask Gemini to find and play music by song, playlist, artist, and more.
Google has been working to add YouTube Music support to Gemini for a while now and the feature was announced at Google I/O 2024. For reference, Gemini extensions allow the chatbot to perform a variety of tasks like automatically starting Google Maps navigation.
One way to enable the extension is to ask Gemini to find or play from YouTube Music. The chatbot will automatically show on-screen instructions to add the YouTube Music extension. Alternatively, you can go to Settings > Extensions > Turn on the YouTube Music toggle button.
The YouTube Music integration allows Gemini to access your YouTube Music data such as playlists, watch history, and liked songs. So, you can throw queries like, "Play music I like," "Turn on White Noise @YouTube Music," and "Show some rock music."
Google has listed some examples of prompt formats that you can use to find and play songs in Gemini chat:
- Find [song name] by [artist name]
- Find the album [album title] by [artist name]
- Find [playlist name] playlist
- Find [genre] music
- Search for songs similar to [song name] by [artist name]
- Find the song that goes [song lyrics]
- Find the [song name] music video
- Start a radio based on the song [song name]
- Search for [artist name] songs
In a support document (spotted by 9to5Google), Google says that Gemini"s YouTube Music integration is not available on Google Messages and only works with prompts in the English language. Moreover, the extension updates your watch history based on your YouTube Music preferences.
When you type in a query to play music on an iOS device, Gemini displays a title card with the song"s name, artist, duration, and number of streams. According to 9to5Google, the song starts playing in the background on Android devices, meanwhile, the YouTube Music app opens automatically on iOS. If you"re trying to play songs on the web version, you will have to click on the card to open the YouTube Music website.