You Can Use Gemini to Summarize YouTube Videos for Free
You’ll only see a fraction of the billions of videos on YouTube in your lifetime, and that’s probably for the best. There are some videos where you just want the key points and you have to sit through a lot of bullshit to get to them. This is wasted time. What if you could reduce your viewing time by summarizing the key information in the videos you watch? Luckily, Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, has a built-in YouTube extension enabled by default.
Enable the YouTube extension in Gemini on your desktop and mobile device.
All available extensions are included by default in Gemini. But if you need to check, here’s where you should go on your desktop and Android or iOS phone.
On your desktop, open Gemini in your browser. Make sure you’re signed in to the Google account you want to use. Then click Settings in the left sidebar and select Extensions from the menu. Toggle the YouTube switch if it’s not blue.
On your mobile phone, open the Gemini app (Android only) or open Gemini in the Google app (iOS). You can also access it in your mobile browser. Click on your profile photo and select Extensions to open the list. Turn on YouTube using 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 on a computer and from the Share menu on a mobile device.
Paste the link into Gemini and use a natural language prompt such as “Summarize this video” or “Give me a short description.”
As you can see in this screenshot, it nailed the video I just watched:
Note. Gemini summarizes YouTube videos using text that YouTube automatically generates, such as subtitles and transcripts. If they are not in the video, it will be impossible to extract anything from it. Additionally, the summarization feature is not supported for YouTube videos in all languages: it is only available in English, Japanese, and Korean.
This summarization feature is especially useful if you need to extract key details from a video, such as price or price comparisons of the products being reviewed.
Tip: I often use it to summarize the main points and check if a long YouTube video is worth watching, especially if the description and comments don’t tell the whole story.
Use Gemini + YouTube as learning aids.
You can ask Gemini to recommend a few videos on a topic of your choice. Then, down the line, you can ask Gemini to summarize a specific video or all of them.
The combination of Gemini and YouTube works well with well-structured and informative videos. This method can quickly give you an overview of a topic before you dive into it. And with the right tips, you can start a video Q&A session with Gemini and create your own “Sparknotes” for learning from the many videos.
Tell Gemini in what format you want to receive the information.
Ask Gemini to organize the information in a nice table, this will be visually useful when a YouTube video compares two products (for example, which laptop to buy). You can also ask Gemini to talk about their pros and cons. Sometimes the AI does this without any further prompting.