Did you know that YouTube recently announced new experimental generative AI features? This is very exciting! I can't wait to walk you through what those features are about and what it may mean for marketing going forward….
Two power-packed AI features
In early November, YouTube announced that it was testing 2 new AI tools - a chatbot to summarize videos and answer questions, and a new AI feature to categorize video comments by topics. Currently, YouTube is experimenting with these generative AI features at a very small scale. If you are a YouTube Premium member using an Android device in the US, you may be able to lay your hands on these features by visiting youtube.com/new. You can find this link is in the description below.
First, let's look at the conversational AI tool. According to Google, this tool will help users dive deeper into the content they are watching. This tool lets users get answers to questions about the video they are watching, recommendations for related content, and more, all without interrupting playback. For certain academic videos, the tool can aid learning journeys by providing quizzes and responses that encourage deeper understanding. If you choose to be part of the experiment, clicking the option 'Ask' next to a yellow sparkle emoji below the video will allow you to ask questions about the video or choose a suggested prompt.
Next feature is the summarization of comment topics using AI. Google describes this feature as AI that organizes large comment sections of long-form videos into easily digestible themes. Similar to the conversational AI tool, this feature is accessible when you click on the comments section under a video. A new option to sort by topics accompanied by a yellow sparkles emoji appears next to the video.
How can these upgrade to YouTube benefit content creators & marketers?
We are witnessing many such AI features popping up in tools and platforms that we use in our personal and professional lives. Many of them are half-baked and lead to lacklustre experience as they leave a lot more to desire. Pilot release of these features with a limited audience is going to ensure that major bug fixes happen early on. No matter what, it is undeniable that these features are a welcome change for the platform, content creators, marketers, and of course, the end users. Although these features are in the testing stage, let's look at how they can potentially benefit the content creators and marketers. The conversational AI tool can help by:
Providing a better navigational experience to the user viewing a particular video - YouTube had introduced the video chapters feature way back in the early 2020. The feature allows video publishers to add information and context to each portion of the video. The listing of chapters in the description below the video also allows user to re-watch a previous section of the video or jump to a section accurately without dragging the progress bar. The conversation AI tool will be able to take that navigational experience to the next level.
Enabling story telling through multiple videos - Marketers can look at creating a series of video content that collectively form a compelling story for their target audience.
Improving chances of content visibility - Currently, content creators and Marketers fight for better content visibility through YouTube search's recommendation engine and YouTube Shorts. The AI suggested content related to a particular video, will provide a new real estate for content visibility.
Creating possibility of customized user interactions - With the current version of the conversational AI tool, Google is testing the functionality of providing quizzes and responses that can aid the learning journeys for academic videos. Going forward, this functionality could be available to wider community of content creators for placing customized quizzes or polls for better user interaction and feedback.
The comment summarization feature could help with:
Faster, prioritized engagement with users - AI will do its magic of analyzing the comments mentioned below the video and automatically categorizing them into relevant topics. This will be enable the content creators and marketers to quickly respond to hot topics first.
Potentially better spam management - According to Google, this feature can be used to remove any comment topics, and even delete individual comments. Content creators particularly have been requesting Google to do something about the comment spam problem. It seems this feature could solve the problem to a good extent.
Generation of new content ideas - Summarized comment topics could become a potent source for new content ideas. Some of these ideas could be related to the content of the video the user is viewing. This means that videos created based on comment topics could start appearing as suggested content in the conversational AI feature, creating organic stories that keep the users hooked to the channel content.
Insight generation - The patterns identified by AI could help marketers with valuable insights into customer sentiment, preferences, and behaviour. This will aid with improved marketing strategies and targeted content development.
Improved online reputation management or ORM - Summarized comment topics can flag negative comments or mentions. This will help marketers address customer grievances promptly, an effective approach for a positive ORM.
Potential downside of these features
Since Google has invested substantial amount of resources in bringing these features to a pilot testing stage, there is a rationale behind them and the benefits are quite clear based on what we know about them. There are, however, a few potential downside to this upgrade to YouTube that should be considered.
Algorithmic bias emerging out of the biases prevailing in the training data could lead to inaccurate categorizations, reinforce stereotypes, misinterpret sentiments or potentially ignore certain user groups.
Limited or complete lack of contextual understanding as AI may not properly understand the context, nuances, sarcasm, and figure of speech that is inherent in human communication.
There could be privacy concerns as comment summarization may require processing of user's personal data. While Google has pretty strong privacy policies, content creators, and particularly marketers, would need to be cognizant of possible privacy violations and maintain a transparent communication with the users.
Over-reliance on automation may erode the much-needed human context and connection. AI is currently in its early stages of deployment in general use case scenarios, and certain situations may require nuanced human understanding that AI may not be able to fully capture.
Keeping these caveats in mind, these AI-based features are quite significant for content creators and marketers alike. The promise they hold in terms of:
expanding reach of video content;
becoming a potent source for new content development;
creating seamless user journeys;
improved user engagement; and
better spam management,
is quite exc-AI-ting, and are functionalities to look forward to. Google may be taking its time when it comes to bringing the magic of AI to its users, it certainly doesn't seem to be holding itself back. And that makes all this very invigorating.
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