ISLAMABAD: This week, Microsoft has added a new feature to its Edge browser that uses artificial intelligence to create text summaries of YouTube videos using its Copilot tool. Although the purpose of the function is to save time and make it more accessible, it is only functional in certain conditions at the moment.
Mikhail Parakhin, the Advertising and Web Services CEO at Microsoft, explained that the feature is based on pre-processing the video material. To work, the video must be pre-processed. In case of subtitles, we can resort to them. However, when a video does not have subtitles and is not pre-processed, the feature will not be functional, he added.
Instead of analysing the content of the video, Edge Copilot seems to summarise videos by reading their transcript or subtitle information. This is consistent with how Microsoft does other products, such as Microsoft 365, where AI is employed to summarise Teams meetings and calls, mainly to provide customer service. These summaries are also reliant on the audio transcription features of Microsoft.
The move is in the context of a competitive AI environment, with large technology companies competing to introduce intelligent, automated features in their platforms. Google has recently added a YouTube extension to its Bard chatbot, which can summarise videos and extract certain information, just last month.
Even though it is still limited, the Edge Copilot update by Microsoft is another step towards incorporating generative AI into our daily digital lives.
