For a while now, Gemini has been able to answer questions about and summarise YouTube videos. Recently it was given new capabilities to actually ‘watch’ videos to gather information that may have been shown on screen but not mentioned in the transcript.
I use this all the time to summarise hours-long podcast discussions and dive into the most interesting parts, or make a decision about whether to watch the whole thing.
Here’s how:
- Check YouTube is enabled by clicking on Settings > Apps and toggling the switch (if you don’t see a YouTube option, your admin needs to enable it)
- In a new chat, ask Gemini to ‘summarise this video’ and paste the link to it
- Optionally, ask follow up questions to dive deeper into the content
- If there’s something visual that isn’t being mentioned because it doesn’t feature in the transcript, ask Gemini to ‘watch the video’
When is this helpful?
- Getting written descriptions of concepts visualised in a videos (e.g. sales funnels or charts)
- Recipe video where you want an ingredients list shown on screen but don’t want to write it down manually
- Finding the exact time in a video a certain topic is covered without scrubbing through the whole thing
Do you have a good idea for this feature that I haven’t covered here? Let me know in the comments.
More tips
There are four months worth of tips available to read for free in the archive, or you can get more in-depth tutorials on my YouTube channel. If you’d like some training just for you or your team, get in touch via this form.
If you liked this tip, please tap the heart button below - it helps others discover the newsletter.
See you next week for another one!
Dean