Microsoft’s Edge Copilot can’t summarise every YouTube video

Microsoft’s AI Copilot has failed to summarise YouTube videos without a written transcript

This week Microsoft AI CoPilot has added a new feature to Edge browser that will generate text summaries of YouTube videos. The time-saving feature, however, is limited and only works on pre-processed videos or those with subtitles.

Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services has explained, “In order for it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles - we can always fallback on that, if it does not and we didn’t preprocess it yet - then it won’t work.”

The Edge Copilot doesn’t seem to summarise videos in comparison to summarising text transcripts of videos. The feature is also available on Microsoft 365, summarizing Teams video meetings and calls for customer service agents. They all require audio transcription by Microsoft first.

Competing in with the AI race to make more automated features available, Microsoft hasn’t lagged behind. Last month Google upgraded its YouTube extension for Bard chatbot to summarise content of a video and surface specific information from it.