Google recently announced an important upgrade to its AI chatbot Bard – the ability to analyze and answer questions about the content of YouTube videos. This new feature significantly expands Bard’s capabilities when it comes to rich media like video, allowing for more natural conversations and practical applications.
2023.11.21 – Experiment updates
Expanding Bard’s understanding of YouTube videos
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.
Source: Google Bard Update page
How Does Bard Understand YouTube Videos?
Previously, Google Bard’s YouTube integration could only find and recommend YouTube videos. For instance, you could ask the chatbot to find motivational videos when you need a boost or find the latest viral videos that everyone is talking about. But now, using advanced AI like natural language processing and neural networks, Bard can not only find videos but also understand them, and answer specific questions about the content of the video. In other words, Bard can watch YouTube and comprehend what it sees, not just search for videos.
Bard uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the audio of YouTube clips. This transcription provides the textual data for Bard to “read” and summarize key information about the video using natural language understanding techniques.
Additionally, computer vision algorithms can identify visual concepts and objects in the video frames to extract even more semantic details. Bard combines these textual and visual signals with broader context from the internet to construct a meaningful representation of the video.
Answering Specific Questions
With this new intelligence about video content, Bard can address queries directly related to the information in a YouTube clip. For example, if you ask the chatbot “How many eggs are used in the olive oil cake recipe shown in a video”, Bard can scan the automatically generated transcript and return the correct number.
You can see the result Live Bard gave to the question here:
https://g.co/bard/share/3d51c7241dce
Bard seems fairly accurate with straightforward factual questions like ingredients, cooking times, geography, people’s names and more depending on the video. But its comprehension still has significant limitations (more on that shortly).
Bard’s summarization abilities are impressive. This does demonstrate that Bard is getting better at comprehending different types of media and formats.
Limitations and Reliability
Despite meaningful progress in video comprehension, Bard still struggles with plenty of blind spots. Most notably, Bard has trouble accurately answering subjective questions that require deeper reasoning or interpretation. Sentiments, implied meanings, subtext and other nuances continue to pose a challenge.
Additionally, Bard’s comprehension depends heavily on the clarity of speech and visuals. Videos with poor audio quality, highly technical vocabulary or niche topics can befuddle the chatbot’s algorithms leading to incorrect or totally irrelevant responses.
There are also lingering concerns about Bard’s reliability following some blunders around fact-checking and making unverified claims in the past.
Applications and Use Cases
While Bard showcases its video chops using recipe clips, there are a number of other settings where summarizing and answering questions about YouTube content could be very useful:
- Education – Understanding lectures, lessons and instructional videos could aid learning. Students could query specifics rather than rewatch long-form videos.
- News & Analysis – Summarizing and fact-checking video news stories could counter misinformation. Bard could surface key developments from hours of pundit coverage.
- Business & Marketing – Answering questions about product demos, commercials or customer testimonials helps buyers. Brands can gauge reactions to campaigns.
- Entertainment & Culture – Summaries of movie trailers, video essays, video game playthroughs or other pop culture clips allow for quick discovery.
- Scientific Research – Comprehending technical academic lectures and research videos could accelerate knowledge sharing between experts.
The possibilities are promising as video becomes an increasingly vital medium for sharing ideas and information.
The update also comes as Google opened up access to Bard to teens in most countries around the world.
2023.11.16 – Experiment Updates
Bard is available for more age groups
- What: Bard is expanding access to teens in most countries around the world, starting with English. We’ve added age-appropriate protections, updated onboarding for teens, and developed experiences geared to empower exploration and learning with Bard. Want to learn more about generative AI and its abilities and limitations? Learn about generative AIOpens in a new window.
- Why: We believe Bard can be a helpful tool for teens when they need a little extra inspiration and motivation on their ideas, hobbies, and plans, or when they want to better understand topics quickly in a style that works for them. Whether it’s learning homework concepts or getting support through big milestones like applying to their first job or preparing for college, Bard can help.
Get help with math equations on Bard
- What: Getting stuck on that math equation? Starting with English, Bard can give you step-by-step explanations to the problem, so you can solve similar ones in the future. Just ask Bard, or take a photo of the question and upload it.
- Why: To learn math effectively, it is important to deeply understand the concept and to practice often. Bard helps you understand and practice new math concepts by giving you not only the solution, but by showing you how to approach solving each one of them.
Bard helps you visualize data
What: Starting with English, Bard can generate charts from data you include in your prompts or from tables that Bard generates during your conversations.
Why: Charts provide a visual way to understand data that you’re interested in learning more about.
