HBO Max Shorts + Ask HBO Max — WBD’s TikTok-style clips and AI search hit US mobile

The last holdout blinked. Warner Bros. Discovery launched two AI-powered mobile discovery tools for HBO Max on July 28: HBO Max Shorts — a vertical, scrollable clip feed — and Ask HBO Max, a natural-language search experience. Netflix shipped Clips in April; Disney+ and Peacock already play the vertical game. Max is now in the format war it spent a year pretending not to need.

Shorts: AI finds the scene, editors pick the cut

Shorts is limited to select US iOS users for now, living next to Home in the tab bar. An in-house ML tool mines scene-level metadata across the catalog; human editors then verticalize the “jaw-dropping / twist / stunning” moments. Tap through to the episode, dump it on My List, or keep scrolling. Sports clips are on the roadmap. WBD is careful to say this is discovery into long-form — not a TikTok competitor with original vertical series.

Ask HBO Max: search by vibe, not title

Ask HBO Max is live for adult US Android users from the search page. Semantic search eats prompts like “dysfunctional family drama” or “best movie for a girls night in” and returns intent matches even when those words never appear in metadata. Amazon Fire TV has had voice NLP for years; Max is finally bringing conversational browse to phone search.

Churn still starts with “nothing to watch.” Max just shipped two answers. Broader device and market rollout TBD — and ownership drama with Paramount’s paused WBD deal still hangs over the roadmap.