Google Bard Update Lets Users Chat With YouTube Videos

Google has dropped a significant update to Bard, and it’s one that’s going to change the way we interact with YouTube videos forever. You can now chat with YouTube videos! How cool is that?

For example, instead of watching the whole two hours of Apple’s WWDC 2023, you can simply ask Bard to summarize the video in bullet points.

This feature is particularly useful for educational or informative videos, allowing you to quickly grasp the essential information without wasting time.

The new feature is part of the experimental update released on November 21, 2023.

What: 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.

Why: We’ve heard you want deeper engagement with YouTube videos. So we’re expanding the YouTube Extension to understand some video content so you can have a richer conversation with Bard about it.

How to Chat with YouTube Videos

Start by giving Bard a YouTube link and asking your question or providing instructions. For instance, to obtain a summary of a video, ask Bard to summarize it in bullet points.

Prompt: Give me a 5 bullet point summary of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEkGLj0bwAU&ab_channel=TED

The feature’s capabilities extend beyond summaries. You can ask Bard to elaborate on specific parts of the video.

Prompt: what specific concerns do we have against AGI?

You can also turn the data into tables and export them to external applications like Google Sheets.

Prompt: create a table and list down the important points in the video

This versatility makes Bard an invaluable tool for extracting insights and organizing information from YouTube videos.

It even provides you with the Python code it used to create the table.

The exported Google Sheets file would look something like this:

That is awesome. I believe that this new feature has the potential to make ChatGPT wrapper apps like Glasp’s YouTube summary web browser extension obsolete.

Why does it matter?

The ability to chat with YouTube videos does not work yet on other popular AI-powered chatbot apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Here’s an example response from ChatGPT using the latest GPT-4 model.

Here’s the response I got from Claude:

Getting personalized recommendations

In addition to its interactive capabilities, Bard can also provide personalized video recommendations based on your viewing history and preferences.

For example, if you ask Bard to give you video recommendations about a specific topic, it’ll try to recommend videos based on your viewing history and preferences.

Prompt: give me youtube video recommendations on learning about AGI. Explain why you recommend them

And by the way, you can play these videos directly inside Bard. That is pretty cool!

YouTube video views will be stored in your YouTube history, and your data will be stored and used by YouTube according to its Terms of Service.

Final Thoughts

I’m really excited to see Google continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with Bard. I’m particularly eager to see how well it works once the Gemini model is released.

Also, maybe they should add a shortcut button to YouTube? That’d be a real time-saver.

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