Microsoft’s Edge Copilot AI can’t actually summarize each YouTube video

One function 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 function 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 net companies, 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 are able to all the time fallback on that, if it doesn’t and we didn’t preprocess it but – then it gained’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 carry out an analogous operate all through Microsoft 365, together with summarizing Groups video conferences and requires customer support brokers — and in each circumstances, the audio must be transcribed first by Microsoft. Copilot on Microsoft Stream may summarize any video, however once more, it requires customers to generate a written transcript.

The dialog began after designer Pietro Schirano posted a display recording of Edge Copilot summarizing a YouTube video concerning 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.

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

Copilot is simply the newest 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 significant Gemini replace that has its personal points — the corporate’s modifying might 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 concerning the numerous phases of Copilot’s evolution on social media. Whereas on a airplane on Tuesday morning, the machine studying knowledgeable posted on X: “Including means for Edge Copilot to make use of info in movies – on a flight.”