Gemini can now watch YouTube for you – skip the video, get the highlights

Gemini Flash 2.0 just debuted last week, but it’s already getting an upgrade — the ability to watch YouTube for you.

If you use YouTube as a resource for cooking, home repairs, crafting, or research, you know how frustrating it can be when it takes someone forever to get to the point. That may soon be a thing of the past because Gemini Flash 2.0 can now watch a YouTube video, extract the important parts, and even answer your follow-up questions. 

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Gemini already had the ability to simply summarize videos, but this new application goes deeper.

How it works

To analyze a YouTube video with Gemini, just paste the video’s link into Gemini.

You can ask specific questions, like a list of ingredients for a recipe or a list of supplies for a DIY craft, ask for a general summary or key idea, or get a transcript of what the speaker is saying.

Gemini will pull from both the video itself and the video description.

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The results

To test it out, I fed Gemini a YouTube link showing how to do a home repair I’ve been putting off and asked it to break the video down into step-by-step instructions. The 12-minute video has its own steps in the description — just four steps — but within a few seconds, Gemini responded with its own six-step plan and a little explanation for each.  

It’s not perfect, though. I gave Gemini a link to a video for a cake recipe and asked it to translate it into a written recipe (the actual written recipe was not in the description). Gemini replied with the ingredients and the process but didn’t give actual amounts for the ingredients. When I asked it to provide the amounts, Gemini said it couldn’t and offered up a similar recipe it found online. The actual amounts were, of course, in the video.

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To test the research capabilities, I found a Yale University lecture that was a little over an hour long. I asked Gemini for a summary, and it gave me a paragraph highlighting the key points. I asked for an outline summary I could use to study, and Gemini provided a seven-point outline with about three additional points under each main one. At a glance, I felt like I had a great grasp on the class, and it took me less than five minutes to read.

Overall, this has the potential to be an incredibly useful feature that lets you use YouTube as a resource without sitting through an entire video. The feature works on both web-based Gemini and the app, and it’s available even if you’re only using the free version.