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Even YouTube is testing a ChatGPT-style chatbot.
On Monday, the Google-owned video platform revealed it's experimenting with generative AI in two ways, including an AI-powered chatbot that can answer your questions. The chatbot may seem counterintuitive since YouTube is primarily about watching video content. But YouTube sees it as a way to help users uncover more content, keeping them on the video service.
“This tool lets you get answers to questions about the video you’re watching, recommendations for related content, and more, all without interrupting playback,” YouTube said in a support document. “For certain academic videos, the tool can aid learning journeys by providing quizzes and responses that encourage deeper understanding.”
An image of the feature in action also shows it can summarize a video for you, bypassing the need to watch the entire clip.
(Credit: YouTube)The feature will appear as a twinkling star button, suggesting the AI tool uses the same large language models powering Google’s Bard chatbot.
YouTube is rolling out the chatbot to a small number of users. “In the coming weeks, YouTube Premium members in the US on Android devices will be able to join the experiment at
YouTube's other generative AI experiment will sum up user comments. Some clips can amass thousands of comments, so YouTube is testing using generative AI to summarize and organize the comment sections of long-form videos into “easily digestible themes.” The feature will appear when you enter a comment section on YouTube’s mobile interface; a button called Topics will automatically sort all the user-generated comments by theme.
(Credit: YouTube)The feature promises to be useful to users and video creators. But it looks like YouTube plans on giving video uploaders plenty of power to remove themes the AI summarizer will index.
“If creators want to remove any comment topics, they can delete individual comments that show up under the specific topic,” YouTube says. “Also, topics are pulled from published comments only and cannot be created from comments that are held for review, contain blocked words or are from blocked users.”
The AI summarizer is already available to YouTube Premium members who opt into the experiment. But for now, the feature only applies to "a small number of videos in English that have large comment sections."