Google Expands Bard's Understanding Of YouTube Videos

Google has updated Bard's YouTube extension, making its widely popular AI-powered chatbot smarter than before.

To those unaware, Google unveiled its first-ever generative artificial intelligence chatbot back in March to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The search giant has been sparing no effort in a bid to improve its AI bot. Earlier this month, Google announced a major update to Bard that enables it to respond to queries in real-time.

Aside from this, Google added Bard Extensions that allow the AI bot to connect with Google services like YouTube, Google Drive and Gmail.

You can ask Google Bard questions about YouTube videos

Now, the Bard team has updated the YouTube extension to ensure the bot can perform more tasks than just searching relevant videos.

The latest post on the official Google Bard updates page confirms the generative AI tool can now understand YouTube videos. Before this update, Bard was only capable of generating a list of YouTube videos relevant to your query.

As a result, you had to watch the whole video to get the information you were looking for. However, this is set to change with the newest experiment update.

Bard can now watch YouTube videos and answer queries about the content. For instance, if you asked Bard to watch a video about the best time to travel to a particular place, you can ask the bot questions like "what types of clothes the video recommends I should carry while visiting the place?"

Likewise, Google says, "if you're looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires".

The folks at MySmartPrice who tested the Bard YouTube extension feature claim the new feature is currently a "hit and miss". Apparently, the feature worked for some of the videos but failed to answer questions related to other videos.

However, this doesn't come as a surprise given that the feature is still being rolled out and is expected to be improved with time.

You can give the new feature a try by visiting Google Bard on your web browser. You can then ask questions related to a YouTube video and it normally works.

You can enable the YouTube extension by visiting this link. All you need to do for the feature to work is to make sure the toggle next to the YouTube icon is turned on.

Google has been updating its Bard chatbot for a while now. In line with this, the American tech giant recently announced Assistant with Bard for Android and iOS smartphones.

This will allow Google Assistant to take advantage of Bard's generative AI powers. The amped-up Assistant is slated to roll out to all users in the coming months.

The word on the street is that Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S24 series will comprise the first smartphones after Google Pixel phones to have Assistant with Bard. This speculation surfaced after 9to5Mac found strings in the code of the latest Google App Beta 14.41 version.