YouTube gets Google Digital Wellbeing tools

At Google I/O in May, Google introduced Digital Wellbeing tools that help people better understand their tech usage, focus on what matters most and disconnect when needed. 

The company has announced that those tools will now be available for YouTube and will now show users their personal time watched profile. “Our goal is to provide a better understanding of time spent on YouTube, so you can make informed decisions about how you want YouTube to best fit into your life,” Brian Marquardt, Director of Product Management, said in a statement. 

The Digital Wellbeing tools can help users monitor and manage their time spend on the platform. Users can now know exactly how much time they have spent watching videos on the platform. To give users a better understanding on this, Google built a profile that is available in the account menu. This profile will tell users how long they have watched YouTube videos in a day and over the week. Another tool is “Remind to take a break”. Once users know about the time they are spending in the app and decides to manage it, they can set a limit. 

To set a reminder, users can head over to Settings and pick the amount of YouTube time that’s right for them. Now if a user loses a track of time when having fun, a friendly reminder will pop up on the screen reminding the user to “take a break”. “If you want more control over when you receive notifications from YouTube, you can bundle all of your YouTube push notifications into a single notification each day and set a specific time to receive your digest. Just go to your Settings to choose when you’d like to receive your digest, and from then on you’ll only receive one notification per day,” the executive noted in the blog post. If you have subscribed to YouTube channels, you will get a lot of notifications. 

The tools can also help you disable notification sounds and vibrations so that you can control the time spent on in the app. To help sort this problem, Google made a change to send all notifications without sound and vibration between 10PM and 8AM. You can enable sounds and vibrations, or customise the start and end time in Settings menu.