YouTube’s AI Chatbot Reads the Comments for You

YouTube is testing out two generative AI features for Premium users that will answer user questions about the video they’re watching and summarize a video’s comment section, Google announced Monday.

An “Ask” button will appear under YouTube videos, opening a chatbot sporting the same logo as Google Bard, suggesting the chatbot is running on Google’s proprietary large language model. Google says the chatbot can provide context on what you’re watching, recommend related videos, or even create quizzes for academic videos to encourage deeper learning. A “Topics” button summarizes the comment sections into the largest themes from a video’s comment section, and YouTube sees this feature as a helpful creator tool.

“These features are experimental and we may not always get it right,” Google said in a blog post. “That’s why we’re starting small with limited availability and collecting feedback.”

YouTube’s video library, with millions of hours worth of video content, has become an incredibly valuable resource in the boom of large language models, which need copious amounts of data to run. Google Bard has a significant advantage over other models with access to the library, similar to the advantage xAI’s “Grok” has with its library of tweets.

Google’s news pales in comparison to OpenAI’s DevDay, which happened the same morning. ChatGPT’s new and enormous context window is perfect for demolishing hours’ worth of YouTube transcripts. Several users took to X to describe how they were downloading thousands of hours worth of YouTube videos and uploading them to ChatGPT to create chatbots, or GPTs, with that knowledge.

Google’s Bard team would probably love to be doing this in-house, but it’s only capable of taking a fraction of the input that ChatGPT can. Google has not publicly specified what Bard’s context window truly is, suggesting that it’s limited.

Google integrated Bard’s AI into other products such as Gmail and Google Docs back in March. The tech giant is hoping to utilize their massive reach to get Bard into the hands of more users for practical purposes, and that includes deepening your YouTube rabbit holes.