Microsoft’s Edge Copilot AI can’t really summarize every YouTube video

One characteristic added to Microsoft’s AI Copilot within the Edge browser this week is the power to generate textual content summaries of movies. However Edge Copilot’s time-saving characteristic remains to be pretty restricted and solely works on pre-processed movies or these with subtitles, as Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s CEO of promoting and internet providers, defined.

As noticed by MSPowerUser, Parakhin writes, “To ensure that it to work, we have to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles – we will all the time fallback on that, if it doesn’t and we didn’t preprocess it but – then it received’t work,” in response to a query. 

In different phrases, by itself Edge Copilot doesn’t a lot summarize movies because it summarizes the textual content transcripts of the movies. Copilot may also carry out an analogous operate all through Microsoft 365, together with summarizing Groups video conferences and requires customer support brokers — and in each instances, the audio must be transcribed first by Microsoft. Copilot on Microsoft Stream may also summarize any video, however once more, it requires customers to generate a written transcript.

The dialog began after designer Pietro Schirano posted a display screen recording of Edge Copilot summarizing a YouTube video in regards to the GTA VI trailer. On this case, Copilot seemed to be doing its job completely. The person within the recording presses the “Generate video abstract” button within the Copilot sidebar, and mere seconds later, Copilot churns one out, full with highlights and timestamps.

After all, many platforms, together with YouTube and Vimeo, can robotically generate transcripts and subtitles — if customers allow the characteristic. After The Verge requested Parakhin on X if we may assume most publicly out there movies (i.e. YouTube) weren’t pre-processed, he replied: “Ought to work for many movies.”

Copilot is simply the most recent instance of the generative AI race Microsoft is competing in with Google (and others). Final month, Google upgraded the YouTube extension for its Bard chatbot to allow it to summarize the content material of a video and floor particular info from it. Simply this week, Google introduced a serious Gemini replace that has its personal points — the corporate’s enhancing could have misrepresented among the AI’s capabilities in a demo, and it doesn’t all the time have its info straight.

Parakhin has been candid in regards to the numerous levels of Copilot’s evolution on social media. Whereas on a airplane on Tuesday morning, the machine studying professional posted on X: “Including means for Edge Copilot to make use of info in movies – on a flight.”