Google Bard can now answer your questions about YouTube videos; This is how it works

Earlier this week OpenAI’s ChatGPT introduced voice features to its mobile apps, and now its competitor Google Bard has received new capabilities too. Google Bard will now be able to watch and understand YouTube videos and answer your questions on it. This new feature has been rolled out and users should be able to test it out. The feature is part of Bard Extensions which were introduced earlier this year. Through different extensions of different Google products, Bard can collaborate and answer queries from the app-specific knowledge base.

The new features were announced in Bard’s blog post which said, “We're taking the first steps in Bard's ability to understand YouTube videos. For example, if you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires”.

Google Bard can now watch YouTube videos

This feature does have some limitations. Bard can understand YouTube videos to a certain extent. It can process the audio and video content of a video and extract the main points and ideas. It can also understand the overall tone and sentiment of a video. However, it will face difficulty understanding videos with complex or nuanced language, or videos that rely heavily on visual cues. Further, Bard does not answer questions from videos that contain ‘potentially unsafe content’.

So, what could be some of the use cases of this feature? Bard’s feature can be very helpful in scenarios where you have to analyze a long video but you do not have the time to watch it in its entirety. You can simply paste the URL and ask it to summarize the video. You can also ask it contextual questions or questions about a specific aspect of the video. However, do note that it may not be able to answer such questions in case the video does not have a caption file that it can read.

YouTube is also testing a similar feature for its Premium users where they can ask an AI-powered chatbot questions about videos or ask for recommendations, and to tell you more about a topic. Interestingly, unlike YouTube, Bard’s feature is available to everyone.