Google will discontinue Play Music this month, and as such, the company is hard at work improving YouTube Music. One of these enhancements revolves around casting and Google Assistant. Songs you ask the Assistant to play while you cast will now show up in your YouTube Music queue on your phone, and when you start playback via the Assistant, you can tap into the queue by casting to the speaker or display in question.

The changes are simple enough and seem to be widely deployed already. If you want to try them for yourself, just cast a playlist, album, or song of your choosing to a Chromecast-compatible device and then ask the Assistant to play another title. The track in question should then show up on your phone, too, with the rest of the queue still intact.

Left: Girl On Fire added to queue via Assistant. Right: How to fully dismiss your current queue in YouTube Music.

Tapping into a queue started via voice is a tad more complicated. To do that, you first have to clear what you last played on your phone by sliding down the mini player above the bottom bar — otherwise, your phone's queue will take over the cast target and stop the music started via voice. Once you've removed the queue on your phone, you can hit the cast button, and you should be able to see the playlist Google Assistant started for you, now controllable and editable on your phone.

Unfortunately, the Google Assistant commands themselves remain as basic as they've always been. You can't ask it to add a song to the queue, so if you want to finish listening to what's currently playing before starting the next track, you'll still have to pick up your phone.

We can't pinpoint when exactly the behavior changed, but the ability to add songs to your queue via voice while casting from your phone might not be something a lot of people know about (or dare to do in fear of losing their queue), so even if this isn't brand new, you can see this as a general tip on how to get the most out of YouTube Music.

Thanks: Jake