YouTube tests AI chatbot that will appear under select videos

Google-owned YouTube is testing a new generative AI chatbot that will let you get answers to questions about the video you’re watching, recommendations for related content and more, all without interrupting playback. The conversational AI tool aims to answer your questions about a video and can also recommend related content. The chatbot will be available to select users as part of the ongoing pilot in countries like the US. The chatbot will help users get answers to questions related to the video and its contents and receive recommendations and summaries for the video content.

“We’re testing two experiments that integrate generative AI into the YouTube viewing experience. Because these experiments are very small, you might not see them just yet,” Google said in a support page.

The AI chatbot is available to a small number of people on a subset of videos, and in the coming weeks, YouTube Premium members in the US on Android devices will be able to join the experiment at youtube.com/new. It is an opt-in feature, so it will not be turned on by default for eligible users. If you want it, you need to sign up for the experiment and the tool will become available in the next few weeks.

For certain academic videos, the AI tool can aid learning journeys by providing quizzes and responses that encourage deeper understanding. To help people easily understand and participate in comment conversations, YouTube is experimenting with AI that organises large comment sections of long-form videos into easily digestible themes. Creators can use these comment summaries to more quickly jump into comment discussions on their videos, or to draw inspiration for new content based on what their audiences are discussing.

“This experiment is running on a small number of videos in English that have large comment sections,” said the company.

— Written with inputs from IANS