AI Arrives on YouTube With Comment Summaries and Video Suggestions

Google’s full-court press into generative AI continued this week as the tech giant announced that the technology would be coming to the YouTube comment section, adding comment summaries and conversational AI to drive engagement and generate new content ideas.

Creating tools for YouTubers has become a cottage industry for third parties, with companies like Tubebuddy, vidIQ, Canva, and TuberTools developing resources for up-and-coming content creators. The new AI tools from Google itself give YouTubers the power to take control of their comment sections and use them to improve their content.

Google’s AI offerings for creators took shape at Google Cloud Next in August, and the next month brought new AI-powered features aimed at helping creators create shorts and long-firm clips on YouTube. The new YouTube AI tools launched this week include comment summarization—which organizes comments under a YouTube video into themes or topics—for creators, and conversational AI for viewers.

A note for beginners, however: Google says the new AI tools will only be available to accounts with lots of viewers and active comment sections.

Comment Summaries

The YouTube comment section is known for being a wild place, but now, thanks to generative AI, YouTubers can mine those comments for suggestions for future videos.

“To help you easily understand and participate in comment conversations, we’re experimenting with AI that organizes large comment sections of long-form videos into easily digestible themes,” Google said.

Google says eligible YouTubers can organize comments by topic and delete individual comments under that topic. However, Google says only published comments can be sorted into topics. Comments held for review, contain blocked words, or users can’t be sorted.

Conversational AI

Google is also adding a chatbot to YouTube that will let users ask questions about the video they are watching and get recommendations for other videos to watch. Google says this new feature will not interrupt video playback.

The new features, Google said, may not be immediately visible for everyone, but YouTubers with a premium account can opt-in to use the features in beta until December 5. Google acknowledges that these AI features are experimental and is conducting these trials with a limited user base to gather early feedback.

Google has not yet responded to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Like Microsoft and Amazon, Google is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. In October, Google added generative AI to its search engine, Pixel phone, and a new AI assistant, Assistant with Bard, named for Google’s ChatGPT rival Google Bard, which the tech giant launched in March.

Google’s offerings are finding fans among creators. In August, virtual worlds platform Hiber said it would use Google’s generative AI tools to simplify game development.

“With the help of generative AI, we’re taking away that last hurdle for creativity,” Hiber CEO Michael Yngfors previously told Decrypt. “People are inherently super creative, but you can get stuck and you don’t know what to do.

Now, [AI] is what we believe is going to unlock creativity for the masses, and unlock that creativity that exists in each and everyone,” Yngfors said.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.