• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 28, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to mature like a child going through mental and physical growing pains.

Google Bard got a slow start when it was first released, but AI chatbots have recently become more useful -- not just to analyze and spit out information based on complex conversational queries, but to offer a deeper analysis of content, visuals and text in YouTube videos.

Bard already had the ability to analyze YouTube videos from a previous update in September, but it could not analyze the content to interpret and provide summarized, detailed answers to queries.

The YouTube update is available through the Bard experiment page.

In one example provided by Android Authority, using America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for an Espresso Martini with a time frame of 3:33, Bard will summarize the content in the video by specifying the video title and channel name or use tagged chapters in the video. Users also can type in “summarize” and paste in the video’s URL.

One publication brings up an interesting dilemma. What if a video is just behind a paywall on a publisher’s website? The video doesn’t include the recipe in the video description.

By watching the YouTube video every time an espresso martini is made, some value goes back to the publisher for that content, writes The Verge.

By having Bard spit out the recipe, the viewer skips the step of pressing play, watching a preroll ad, and viewing the channel’s other recommended videos at the end.

The prompt “Give me a recipe for a holiday dinner. Show me a video” in another example initially provides content focused on multiple videos. Bard answers the prompt by serving a collection of up to five videos from YouTube. Users can then ask for details about video content, such as “Give me the recipe for video 4.”

Bard understands the meaning of “video 4” and provides a text summary, including a breakdown of the ingredients and methods. Queries, for example, also can include questions like “if there are any charts, graphs, or visual aids.”

Some suggest this could become worrisome for creators, especially when the content lives behind a firewall and the viewer needs to watch the recipe video repeatedly when they cannot remember the ingredients.  

Other AI bots have the ability to summarize content. While ChatGPT does not yet have the ability to summarize a complete PDF, users can drop the document into Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, to receive back a complete summary of the content, even if the document includes hundreds of pages of content.

The AI will provide a complete summary of the content, as demonstrated during a class held by the Mobile Marketing Association.