You’ll only see a petite fraction of the billions of YouTube videos in your lifetime – which may be for the best. In some movies you only want the most vital points and have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get to them. It’s wasted time. What if you could shorten your viewing time by summarizing the most vital information from the videos you watch? Fortunately, Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, has the YouTube extension built-in and enabled by default.
Enable the YouTube extension in Gemini on your computer and mobile phone
All available extensions are enabled by default in Gemini. But if you want to check it out, here’s where you should go for your desktop and Android or iOS phone.
On the desktop, open it Twins in your browser. Make sure you’re signed in to the Google account you want to employ. Then click Settings in the left sidebar and select Extensions in menu. Toggle the YouTube switch if it’s not blue.
Source: Saikat Basu
On your mobile phone, open the Gemini app (Android only) or open Gemini in the Google app (iOS). You can also access it in a mobile browser. Click on your profile picture and select Extensions to open the list. Turn on YouTube with the toggle if it’s turned off.
How to employ Gemini to summarize YouTube videos
Open the video you want to watch and summarize. Copy its URL from the address bar if you’re on a computer and the Share menu on your mobile device.
Paste the Gemini link and employ natural language prompts like “Summarize this video” or “Send me a quick summary.”
As this screenshot shows, it did a thorough job on the video I just watched:
Source: Saikat Basu
Note: Gemini summarizes YouTube videos using text automatically generated by YouTube, such as captions and transcripts. If the video doesn’t contain them, you won’t be able to extract anything from it. Additionally, the summary feature is not supported for YouTube videos in all languages: it is only available in English, Japanese, and Korean.
This summary feature is especially useful if you want to extract the most vital details from a video: for example, the price or price comparison of the products reviewed.
Tip: I often employ it to generate main points and see if a long YouTube video is worth watching, especially if the description and comments don’t suggest anything.
Utilize Gemini + YouTube as your study companion
You can ask a Gemini to recommend some movies on a topic of your choice. You can then ask Gemini to summarize a specific movie or all of them.
The combination of Gemini and YouTube works well for well-organized and informative videos. This method allows you to quickly get an overview of a topic before diving deeper into the topic. With the right prompts, you can start a Q&A session with Gemini about the videos and create your own “Sparknotes” to learn from several videos.
Tell Gemini what format you want the information in
Asking a Gemini to arrange information in a nice table is visually helpful when a YouTube video compares two items (which laptop to buy, for example). You can also ask Gemini to present their advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes the AI does this without any additional prompting.
Source: Saikat Basu
