Gemini can now find, play, and control music from YouTube Music

One of the last remaining advantages Google Assistant had over Gemini was the ability to control your music. But that has now changed as Google is widely rolling out a YouTube Music extension for the chatbot.

First spotted by 9to5Google, Gemini users can now connect the AI to YouTube Music. The YouTube Music extension is off by default, so you’ll have to activate it first.

To activate the extension, you’ll need to head over to gemini.google.com/extensions on your PC or Android phone. Once connected, you can use the extension by going to the Gemini website or the Android mobile app and entering a prompt. It appears the extension only works with English prompts, for now.

As the company explains, you can ask Gemini to “show, find, or play music from YouTube Music.” You can also ask for a specific song by title, artist, album, playlist, and so on. For example, you could say, “Find [song name] by [artist]” and the chatbot will dig it up for you.

In addition to finding and playing music, you’ll also be able to control playback. Users will have the following commands at their disposal:

• Pause
• Resume or play
• Stop
• Skip or next
• Previous
• Restart or go back

Google adds that “background play on Android devices is only available to YouTube Music Premium members.”

At the moment, it appears the extension isn’t fully working yet on PC. You’ll just see a response that says, “I can’t assist you with playing media yet, but I can provide you with a link to the song on YouTube Music.”

This extension was first discovered a few weeks ago at the beginning of May. It’s nice to see this functionality finally roll out widely for Gemini users, but it probably should have been from the get-go.