You’ll only watch a small fraction of the billions of videos on YouTube in your lifetime—which may be for the best. There are some videos where you just want the main points, and you have to go through a lot of nonsense to get there. This is a waste of time. What if you could reduce your viewing time by summarizing the important information in 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 desktop and mobile.
All available extensions are enabled by default in Gemini. But if you need to check, where you should go on desktop and Android or iOS phone.
On the desktop, open Gemini in your browser. Make sure you’re signed in to the Google account you want to use. Then, click Setting Select and on the left sidebar. Extensions In the menu, if it’s not blue, toggle the switch for YouTube.
Credit: Sakat Basu
On your mobile, open the Gemini app (Android only) or open Gemini in the Google app (iOS). You can also access it from a mobile browser. Tap and select your profile picture. Extensions To open the list. Enable YouTube with the toggle switch if it is disabled.
How to Use Gemini to Summarize YouTube Videos
Open the video you want to watch and summarize. Copy its URL from the address bar if on desktop and from the share menu on mobile.
Paste the link into Gemini, and use a natural language prompt like “Summarize this video” or “Give me a quick summary.”
As this screenshot shows, it did the exact same thing with a video I just watched:
Credit: Sakat Basu
Note: Gemini summarizes YouTube videos using text that YouTube generates automatically, such as captions and transcripts. If a video doesn’t have them, he won’t be able to get anything out of it. Also, the summary feature isn’t supported for YouTube videos in every language: it’s only available in English, Japanese, and Korean.
This summary feature is especially useful if you need to extract important details from the video: for example, the price or price comparison of the products being reviewed.
Tip: I often use it to generate key points and check if a long YouTube video is worth watching, especially if the description and comments don’t suggest anything.
Use Gemini + YouTube as a learning companion.
You can ask Gemini to recommend a few videos on a topic of your choice. Then, in a follow-up, you can ask Gemini to summarize a specific video—or all of them.
Gemini and YouTube pair well with well-structured and informative videos. This method can give you a quick overview of a topic before diving into the deep end. And with the right prompts, you can start a question-and-answer session with Gemini on videos and create your own “Sparknotes” to learn from a bunch of videos.
Tell Gemini the format in which you want the information.
Asking Gemini to plot the information into a nice table is visually helpful when a YouTube video compares two items (for example, which laptop to buy). You can also ask Gemini to present their pros and cons. Sometimes, the AI does this without any additional prompting.
Credit: Sakat Basu
Credit : lifehacker.com
