Six lesser-known YouTube tricks you should try out right away

YouTube gets over a billion hours of video views every day, with its user base growing day by day. With this large user base, the video platform offers a plethora of features to enhance its users' viewing experience. However, there are several tricks that are not commonly known and can help improve your video watching experience.

1. Search Smarter on YouTube – As it has a database of millions of videos, the search for YouTube often ends up showing thousands of results. One way to get better results is to use the filters provided by YouTube – tap on the filters button, and it lets you filter by upload date, type, duration, and features. The other trick is to make sure a specific keyword is not included in your search results. You can do this by simply adding the subtract sign '-'before your keyword. E.g., if you want to search for Cricket news which does not include Australia, then your search would be Cricket News –Australia on YouTube.

2. Get text transcript of the audio in any video – YouTube videos are automatically transcribed using Google's speech recognition technology, and these transcriptions are available for users. Viewing the transcript is useful when you are either watching videos without sound or unable to understand what is being spoken in the video. To access the video's transcript on a computer, click on the three dots next to the save button below the video and select the 'Open transcript' option. It will show the transcript next to the video along with the timestamp.

3. Create a video playlist to watch later – How often do you find an interesting video but cannot view it immediately due to one or the other reason? A solution to this is to create a video playlist for such videos using YouTube's Watch Later feature. Click on the three dots next to the video thumbnail in the search or on the homepage and then select the option to 'Save to Watch later". You can then view the video list by going to the 'Watch Later' queue, which can be accessed on the desktop by click on the three lines at the top left corner next to the YouTube logo. On a smartphone, you can access the watch later videos by tapping on your profile photo at the top right.