Microsoft Edge Copilot AI has a cool video summary feature, but it will not work on all YouTube videos

Microsoft Edge Copilot AI has recently received a new feature that allows it to offer text summaries of videos, but it turns out there is a problem — it will not work on all YouTube videos.

Microsoft Edge Copilot AI can only summarize those YouTube videos that already have closed captions embedded in them. (Microsoft )

In an effort to keep up with the AI race, Microsoft has been scrambling to add new features to its various Copilot tools. Earlier this week, Microsoft Edge Copilot AI received an update that added a useful feature that allowed it to generate text summaries of videos. Not only that, the feature also lets users ask the Copilot questions about the video. The feature is similar to the one Google Bard received a couple of months ago where, through its YouTube extension, it could do similar things. But it appears that just like Google Bard, Microsoft Edge Copilot is also limited in its functionality and can only summarize videos in specific conditions.

A clarification of its limitations comes from an X post by Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of advertising and web services at Microsoft. He said, “In order for it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles - we can always fallback on that, if it does not and we didn't preprocess it yet - then it won't work”.

Microsoft Edge Copilot AI will not summarize all videos

It was first reported by MSPowerUser and the article explains the transcription functionality of the Copilot relies on pre-processing videos or the availability of subtitles or closed captions. The latter is easy to understand, but pre-processing here, in simple terms, means the video needs to be transcribed by Microsoft ahead of time for the AI tool to work.

This is similar to the transcription feature in MS Teams, where Microsoft has access to the audio and video files and processes them through a different software technology. In the case of the Microsoft Edge Copilot trying to summarize a video, if it has been picked up by Microsoft for pre-processing, then the AI tool can access the data through the cloud and provide a summary, but otherwise, it cannot.

This severely limits the functionality of the tool as most of the videos on the internet, be it YouTube videos, Vimeo, or any other platform, do not come with subtitles. On top of that, it is impossible for Microsoft to pre-process all the videos on the internet. Some reports suggest that YouTube alone has at least 800 million videos active on the platform.

So, while users might be able to summarize and ask questions about videos from prominent channels that rigorously add subtitles to the videos, there is a good chance that the Microsoft Edge Copilot tool will simply not work.

One more thing! We are now on WhatsApp Channels! Follow us there so you never miss any update from the world of technology. ‎To follow the HT Tech channel on WhatsApp, click here to join now!